Alien (1979): The history & cultural impact, w/ Roger Luckharst & Jason Eberle

[00:00:01] [SPEAKER_05]: Hey everybody, it's David from The Lorehounds here. Just dropping in ahead of the podcast proper here

[00:00:08] [SPEAKER_05]: just to provide a little context and set up this was a joint project

[00:00:13] [SPEAKER_05]: that we did with Aisha from the every single sci-fi film ever podcast.

[00:00:19] [SPEAKER_05]: This is a little bit more of Aisha's format bringing on a couple of academics and then going through a little bit more of a structured conversation

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_05]: and this is part of our big joint project that we've done with Aisha to cover aliens.

[00:00:37] [SPEAKER_05]: We've got the new movie Alien Romulus which is coming out on the 16th and then we of course have the 45th anniversary of the movie.

[00:00:44] [SPEAKER_05]: So we've got a trailer reaction for Romulus. We have a conversation about Alien 1979

[00:00:52] [SPEAKER_05]: and that's with Aisha and Elisha and myself and we have this podcast and then we'll have a movie review once Romulus comes out.

[00:01:02] [SPEAKER_05]: And then for subscribers of course we have some bonus material where I break down the trailers in detail.

[00:01:09] [SPEAKER_05]: Anyway, be sure to check out every single sci-fi film ever. It's an amazing podcast. Aisha is great.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_05]: We're really happy to know her and to be working on a few projects here and there with her.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_05]: Other than that, here comes the episode.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Hello and welcome to this special crossover episode. To learn more about the crossover which has multiple podcasts you can head on over to the show notes.

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Aisha from the Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever podcast.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_05]: And I'm David from the Lorhounds podcast. Today Aisha and I are going to be speaking about the 1979 film Alien with some fantastic guests.

[00:02:05] [SPEAKER_05]: Alien was directed by Ridley Scott who was at the time a relatively new director.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_04]: And the film has gone on to sport a huge franchise which includes the very recently released Alien Romulus.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_05]: There have been at least two crossover movies with the Predator franchise as well as a myriad of short films, video games, books, articles and even academic essays on the film that have all cemented its reputation as one of the science fiction films with the longest lasting legacies.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_05]: All of this despite the original film receiving very lukewarm reviews during its initial release.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_05]: Vincent Canby of the New York Times warned us not to race the alien expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretensions of 2001, a space odyssey and close encounters of the third kind.

[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_05]: And that it provided shocks of a most mundane kind.

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_05]: Roger Ebert described it as basically just an intergalactic haunted house thriller.

[00:03:02] [SPEAKER_04]: And Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian that it would amaze, but with a story that is basically just a mixture of the creature from the black lagoon and the thing from outer space.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_04]: And that Ridley Scott's combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice however, it has in profusion.

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_04]: And with that, on to our wonderful guests. Roger Lachhurst is a professor at Birkbeck University of London.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_04]: He specialises in literature, film and cultural history from the 19th century period to the present.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_04]: He has written numerous number of articles and books including the BFI classic book on Alien.

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Welcome back to the show Roger. How are you doing?

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Hi Dave, very well thank you. This is very exciting crossover. I'm really looking forward to this.

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_05]: We also have Jason Erbil who is a professor of healthcare ethics at St. Louis University with special interest in biotechnology, human enhancement and the philosophy of human nature.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_05]: He has also written extensively including a range of books that examine the philosophy of various mainstream media such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.

[00:04:08] [SPEAKER_05]: Welcome to the show Jason. How are you doing?

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_05]: Good. David, Aisha, Roger, it's a pleasure to be here with all of you.

[00:04:13] [SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_05]: Indeed. Thank you all for being here. This is a lot of fun. It's good to see this come into tuition.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_05]: I see on social media that Alien Month is trending as one of the hashtags. Everybody's getting excited for this new film.

[00:04:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I just saw the trailer yesterday. I went to go see Deadpool and Wolverine.

[00:04:30] [SPEAKER_01]: The trailer looked really awesome.

[00:04:33] [SPEAKER_02]: I've just got my invitation for the Gala in the UK on the 14th of August I think.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm really looking forward to see what they do with that.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_02]: No spoilers.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, which we're just going to explain that because this podcast will be coming out after the release. This has already happened all of it.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. So can we start off with a quote from Dan O'Bannon who was the writer of Alien. He said,

[00:05:00] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't steal from anybody. I steal from everybody. Roger, can you talk a bit about the origins of the story?

[00:05:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Dan O'Bannon is someone who came through with people like John Carpenter.

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_02]: So he was very involved in John Carpenter's student film Dark Star. In fact, he had a long-term grudge against Carpenter for not getting a co-directing credit.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_02]: He had grudges with everyone though, so that's okay.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And he said quite openly that Alien was about really throwing together lots of different kind of influences.

[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_02]: So I think as you've mentioned from those early reviews, the thing is an obvious kind of reference point here.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_02]: It came from outer space. He was a very kind of well-read science fiction fan.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_02]: So quite a lot of the material here echoes stories by Van Vogt who was a classic 30s hard science fiction writer

[00:05:59] [SPEAKER_02]: who in fact sued them quite successfully, I think, for borrowing some of his ideas from his novel Space Beagle.

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And there are a whole load of kind of films from the 60s and 70s, really quite pulpy ones that Dan O'Bannon was just clearly an expert in.

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_02]: So he kind of borrowed from, you know, the space vampires and all these kinds of stuff that were floating around.

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And you can see lots and lots of influences all kind of hurled together into one mix.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And so his script, which was brilliantly called Space Beast, was part of the kind of early elements of this.

[00:06:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And then of course that got reworked by other people involved in the project.

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. And I think we can't underestimate the effect of him participating with Yudorovsky's Dune,

[00:06:47] [SPEAKER_05]: but also as well as the Dark Star coming out of Dark Star, I believe, he was very motivated because of whatever reasons.

[00:06:56] [SPEAKER_05]: But he really wanted to use those experiences to help inform this screenplay that he wrote with Shuset.

[00:07:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So he'd been hired by Hororovsky, the lunatic Mexican Peruvian to kind of do this kind of dune thing,

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_02]: which was this massive project was going to cost millions and millions and millions.

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Pink Floyd were going to be hired to do the music for this and that, and Salvador Dali was going to be in it.

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And so was Mick Jagger, you know, it was all very kind of crazy.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_02]: But he was involved and built a design team for Dune, which was amazing in Paris.

[00:07:33] [SPEAKER_02]: He was there for quite a few months.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And when that collapsed, he actually brought together that design team back once his script had been picked up.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_02]: But yes, he went home to America and stayed on the sofa of his friend Ron Shuset.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And I love the detail that he had, you know, terrible kind of stomach problems and he had Crohn's disease in the end,

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_02]: but he was kind of agonized by stomach problems.

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_02]: That seems to go straight into the script of Alien, doesn't it?

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Of this kind of sense of something inside you that's kind of eating at you.

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And it feels really sort of powerful for that.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_02]: So Danobannon is crucial for this, even though he had to fight like hell to get his name anywhere near the credits in the end for Alien.

[00:08:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Danobannon and his stomach bug are both very important to this.

[00:08:22] [SPEAKER_02]: They really are.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_04]: So although it had lukewarm reviews, what do you think makes Alien stand out from other films of this era and this genre?

[00:08:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, to me, I think it's undoubtedly horror films work when they have an iconic moment that is so profoundly traumatic that in a sense it shudders through the whole culture.

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_02]: So that sort of chess bursting scene was completely unprecedented, I think.

[00:08:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And it has a whole mythology around it, whether the actors themselves knew what was just about to happen,

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_02]: whether they had an authentic kind of horrified response.

[00:08:58] [SPEAKER_02]: But there's something so spectacular about that.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's what Walter Hill, the producer said was,

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_02]: I've just read this terrible script called Space Beast, but it's got one fantastic scene.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_02]: So this sort of sense of that kind of element.

[00:09:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And really the whole of the franchise, I think, is all about trying to recover that moment and try and repeat that kind of cultural shock,

[00:09:23] [SPEAKER_02]: which of course you can't do, but nevertheless it's a kind of sense of this is the thing that kind of burst through into a kind of collective unconscious almost.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_02]: So that and that's nothing you can predict.

[00:09:36] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can't predict that Sadako with her long hair crawling out of a television is going to be have such a profound effect.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_02]: But nevertheless, that was also one of those cultural kind of shock moments.

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Which is from Ringu, right?

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Which is from Ringu, yeah.

[00:09:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And again, you know, creates a sort of franchise.

[00:09:54] [SPEAKER_02]: And that sort of sense of these moments of traumatic shock for me, I think are the other kind of crucial reasons why Alien follows through.

[00:10:03] [SPEAKER_02]: But it's not necessarily a predictable kind of moment, but nevertheless fantastic.

[00:10:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Jason, what kind of influence or impact did this film have on you when you first saw it?

[00:10:13] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't see when it first came out.

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_01]: I was a little young at that point.

[00:10:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But when I saw it either in middle school, high school, I was already a huge sci-fi fan of Star Wars, Star Trek.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Also the sort of 80s horror genres, Friday 13th, Freddy Krueger, I remember I'm sure and all that.

[00:10:30] [SPEAKER_01]: And so right away, Alien spoke to me as this wonderful amalgamation of sci-fi and horror.

[00:10:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think in terms of sort of the breakthrough message beyond just the visuals and so on is this idea that, you know, as the tagline famously says,

[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_01]: in space no one can hear you screen, right?

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_01]: That there is, you know, with Star Trek, you have this positive vision of the future.

[00:10:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Star Wars is this, you know, space Western where the heroes win in the end.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_01]: And this is just completely upends all the sort of sci-fi tropes that we had inherited,

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_01]: especially those of us growing up in the late 70s and the 80s.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of the impact on me is like, oh, this is, yeah, completely different.

[00:11:12] [SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, of course, the franchise sort of has evolved from that point.

[00:11:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, Alien's still my favorite.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_05]: I think that's a really great segue into the talking about the grittiness of this film where we had a very clean look from 2001 Space Odyssey.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_05]: Also in Star Wars.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_05]: But then in Star Wars, we had heroes on a journey and there's quests and nobility.

[00:11:34] [SPEAKER_05]: And yet in this film, it's sweaty, it's gritty, it's management, it's labor, it's a space tug pulling a refinery.

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_05]: So I think that's one of the interesting things is how that how we could see ourselves on the screen.

[00:11:50] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know, Roger, have you looked into or what are your thoughts around the fact that in the late 70s,

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_05]: we were really struggling both in the UK and the United States with labor issues and corporate control.

[00:12:03] [SPEAKER_05]: And there was a lot going on.

[00:12:04] [SPEAKER_05]: So how do you see the relationship between the film and who we as an audience were at that time and the ability to see ourselves on screen?

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's that.

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that is so right about the grittiness of it.

[00:12:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's what's kind of quite radical.

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And really, this is the vision that Dan O'Bannon had in Dark Star as well.

[00:12:23] [SPEAKER_02]: This is this is kind of astronauts who are just utterly bored in space and they're just kind of, you know,

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_02]: practicing their firing their lasers at objects because they're bored.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_02]: They are setting fire to things.

[00:12:38] [SPEAKER_02]: They're really grumpy.

[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_02]: They're cross.

[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_02]: Don't give me any philosophical nonsense.

[00:12:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I just give me a planet to blow up, you know, that famous line from from that.

[00:12:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's carried straight through into something like alien.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_02]: So just the year before, as you say, you know, Star Wars is shiny and bright and Star Trek also very fetishistic, shiny, lovely,

[00:13:04] [SPEAKER_02]: a USS enterprise.

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And here we have a very grimy Nostromo that you wonder around these quite grubby

[00:13:13] [SPEAKER_02]: to pick up truck corridors.

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, pick up truck.

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's also the set is built out of old World War two materials that they just took from nearby dumps.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that sort of sense of a real kind of grimyness of it.

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_02]: And what that immediately kind of leads into once the crew are reawakened by this distress signal is a sense of just like

[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_02]: no hierarchy, cross people, Parker and Brett stand for the kind of workers who are saying what about our bonus?

[00:13:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Why have we been woken up?

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Are we going to get paid for this?

[00:13:49] [SPEAKER_02]: How do we, you know, I don't respect the captain captain has no authority on the ship at all.

[00:13:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And all the way through the franchise that's consistent is that, you know, the captain's never had authority.

[00:13:59] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's it is exactly ground into this kind of late 70s moment.

[00:14:05] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, in the UK where Ridley Scott was filming this in Shepperton just outside London,

[00:14:11] [SPEAKER_02]: there were constant strikes actually on sets of films that really made around there as well.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_02]: This is the it was made just before the winter of discontent as it's called in England.

[00:14:24] [SPEAKER_02]: So this is the winter of 1978 79 when there was a final sense of, you know,

[00:14:29] [SPEAKER_02]: labor unions really having the whip hand over the government.

[00:14:34] [SPEAKER_02]: They'd already defeated one government in 1974 by stopping any coal being produced.

[00:14:39] [SPEAKER_02]: So we had a three day week so called and lots and lots of scheduled power cuts.

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_02]: I remember that as a child.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_02]: It's all very exciting with your candles in the early 70s.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_02]: So that sort of sense of a real kind of, you know, crisis and famously this is still much debated politically.

[00:14:57] [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's significance.

[00:14:58] [SPEAKER_02]: But in the winter of discontent, even the dead couldn't be buried because there was this kind of strike of council working undertakers.

[00:15:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's the atmosphere in which the film is made.

[00:15:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's also the atmosphere in which both alien and actually James Cameron's aliens was made because James Cameron being being quite hawkish

[00:15:18] [SPEAKER_02]: was totally appalled coming to Britain and discovering that the unions had such power on sets.

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And he was so cross about tea breaks, everyone just stopped and had tea breaks.

[00:15:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And he famously said that he bought the entire tea trolley in order to stop people kind of taking breaks from work.

[00:15:36] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a whole element of a kind of union kind of anger and frustration in the film as well.

[00:15:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And then just one detail I think it's really important to realise that Jaffet Cotto, who plays Parker had just come out of Paul Schrader's brilliant film Blue Collar.

[00:15:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And that is precisely about auto workers in the States.

[00:15:57] [SPEAKER_02]: It's about, you know, kind of union conspiracies, the attempt to try and kind of rob their own union in order to get money because they're so poorly paid.

[00:16:07] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, all of that stuff, Jaffet Cotto is carrying that through into the film as well.

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_02]: So I think it is kind of ribbon with all of these union details.

[00:16:15] [SPEAKER_05]: Jason, I think we're mostly contemporaries, you and I.

[00:16:18] [SPEAKER_05]: So we probably remember coming out of the 70s and going into the 80s, especially with auto manufacturing.

[00:16:25] [SPEAKER_05]: That's really when especially the Japanese auto industry started to dominate in the United States.

[00:16:31] [SPEAKER_05]: And so then we have this element of corporate control that is very far removed.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_05]: And maybe a plant manager, hey, I'm just a plant manager, you know, being Dallas.

[00:16:43] [SPEAKER_05]: And then the line workers being Harry Dean Stanton and Jaffet Cotto, you know, who are complaining about their bonuses and stuff.

[00:16:51] [SPEAKER_05]: How do you remember that time period in terms of labour relations and what was going on in the United States?

[00:16:57] [SPEAKER_05]: Because it was filmed in England, but you know, the big market at the time before a global market was for American audiences.

[00:17:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I think that part of the even though it's pointed out, you know, at the get go, the critical reviews of the film weren't that hot when it first came out.

[00:17:15] [SPEAKER_01]: But clearly had a resonance with audiences, built up over time such that we could get something like James Cameron's Aliens, you know, financed and produced.

[00:17:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And so I do think that a big, you know, resonant factor with audiences was just that they could see themselves in these characters.

[00:17:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, these weren't, you know, again, the larger than life space opera folks that, you know, who are in Star Wars, right?

[00:17:42] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, Luke Skywalker is almost a mythical figure, something that they kind of turn on its head when they get to the last Jedi.

[00:17:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the, you know, Gene Roddenberry famously, you know, the Star Trek wanted all the characters represent the best of humanity, the sort of almost sanitized, like, you know, can you really see yourselves, you know, in these folks?

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_01]: They're the best of the best. Well, you know, we don't feel that way.

[00:18:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And then certainly, you know, people who are working, you know, what we would call, you know, blue collar jobs, you know, who are just trying to eke out living, trying to survive.

[00:18:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they can identify so much more with these types of characters.

[00:18:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And again, that notion of distance, of control, of having your fate being determined by others.

[00:18:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we're going to get, you know, we need bonus pay to do this.

[00:18:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And Ash basically, he'll remind them of their contract they signed, which like the rest of us, no one ever really reads, right?

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_01]: They probably just saw it.

[00:18:45] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, they saw the dollar figures and signed, okay, I'm not going to do it.

[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, by the way, if this happens, you got to do it or for total forfeiture of your shares.

[00:18:55] [SPEAKER_01]: And again, that's very real. That's very grounded.

[00:18:57] [SPEAKER_01]: That's not at all science fictional, right?

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_01]: That's just real life.

[00:19:01] [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I think that's one of the reasons that the film was so resonant because yeah, American workers were experiencing that as the economy started to shift to a global multinational economy versus just, you know, you work at the same plant where your father worked and whatever.

[00:19:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, and you know who the boss is and you have a Lord for dinner.

[00:19:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, that's those days are, you know, started to disappear by that point.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_05]: And now they're really co-mingles with the horror element, right?

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_05]: Because yeah, we have this monster, but then we have who's the real monster, you know, the corporation.

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_05]: But then I think that's the background for our hero or heroine to emerge.

[00:19:43] [SPEAKER_04]: The female hero like it was apparently written as unisex.

[00:19:46] [SPEAKER_04]: So they could have gone either way. But for myself growing up, it was like a really significant character and to have someone as a female who isn't particularly coded female except for those last few scenes.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_04]: She, you know, she could easily be male and that makes it so different because she's not expected to act in any feminine ways.

[00:20:06] [SPEAKER_04]: What kind of effect did that have both on cinema or on you personally when you saw the film?

[00:20:11] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to go first.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Again, growing up with Star Wars, right? You have Princess Leia.

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_01]: But even though she's tough and, you know, she's the great author, you know, the garbage shoot, you know, someone has to rescue our skins.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_01]: But of course, she's also a princess and is dressed in sort of virginal white and famously, you know, George Lucas won Carrie Fisher's breasts not to be sort of standing out.

[00:20:39] [SPEAKER_01]: And then you sort of have the hypersexualization in Return of the Jedi.

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_01]: And so Ripley, as you said, except for those sort of last few scenes where she's stripped down to her skivvies, you know, pretty much the character could be a man or woman.

[00:20:55] [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, Sigourney Weaver plays the character in this way that it just sort of just sort of blinds you to gender differences.

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, that's obviously a huge topic today of what gender means and relationship of sex and gender and so on.

[00:21:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And I guess to me, I like seeing a character.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_01]: I like to see female characters both who sort of show strength within the context of their feminine identity and also those for whom their feminine identity is a total non-player for who there was a character.

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_01]: I think we need both represented in cinema.

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting also as how she's set up in the film because she's not.

[00:21:37] [SPEAKER_04]: We don't know that she's the protagonist. Why do you think they made that choice?

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, well, I also think just to kind of jump in, I also think that it's that's a very brilliant device actually, because it's misdirection the first kind of 10 or 15 minutes of this.

[00:21:52] [SPEAKER_02]: You actually don't know who the kind of central protagonist is going to be.

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's also part of the gender blindness of it, I think.

[00:22:00] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's maybe it's going to be Cain, but he gets killed off quite early.

[00:22:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Sorry to ruin it.

[00:22:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And he also, you know, the captain isn't going to be the kind of heroic figure.

[00:22:12] [SPEAKER_02]: It's only slowly that someone like Seguni Weaver, who's kind of middle management actually is slowly kind of emerging.

[00:22:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And that is a I do think it's a really kind of revolutionary decision, even if they're not, you know, card carrying feminists here on who are making this film.

[00:22:30] [SPEAKER_02]: There's a kind of sense in which, you know, OK, so we'll make this gender blind, but then also the decisions that are made through this mean that it's overturning this sense of the damsel in distress,

[00:22:40] [SPEAKER_02]: which is what so many kind of space, you know, space operative are.

[00:22:46] [SPEAKER_02]: It's what drives something like Star Wars, as we were saying, that sense of, you know, the rescuing of the very passive kind of female figure.

[00:22:54] [SPEAKER_02]: And here instead, you've got someone who's emerging as a very kind of androgynous, not gender coded at all.

[00:23:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And then I think, crucially, this is to go back to before Alien came out.

[00:23:08] [SPEAKER_02]: There's a trick about the death of the Captain Dallas, which you don't actually see him die.

[00:23:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And what you're expecting, because this is the genre convention, is that he will come back at the end and rescue the damsel in distress.

[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_02]: It's got to be a man at the end who's going to come back and rescue.

[00:23:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And Alien refuses to do that. It's all on Ripley's own terms, even down to the very end, even when she is sexualized by the end.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_02]: There is this sort of sense of, well, she's still carrying a harpoon.

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_02]: She still has the kind of sense of this kind of phallic power about her.

[00:23:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And they just sort of this all comes, I think, about partially accidentally, but they really run with it for the rest of the series.

[00:23:47] [SPEAKER_02]: They've discovered something.

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And the way that women spectators write about the film and different kinds of spectators,

[00:23:57] [SPEAKER_02]: so lots of lesbian theorists and so on have sort of said, this is an amazing moment when you have a non-gendered kind of heroine

[00:24:06] [SPEAKER_02]: who isn't necessarily gay or straight, doesn't really matter.

[00:24:11] [SPEAKER_02]: It's more about the fact that she's not coded in any kind of way that makes it so revolutionary.

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_02]: So I think it's really important to get back to that kind of moment of just the kind of sheer excitement of doing something different with that character.

[00:24:26] [SPEAKER_05]: There's a scene that I believe is deleted or maybe in one of the various iterations.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_05]: I just recently watched the director's cut, which also had some interesting things.

[00:24:36] [SPEAKER_05]: But this scene wasn't in it where Ripley encounters Dallas cocooned in the alien hive material.

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_05]: And now that you've just said what you said, that's really fascinating because by removing that scene, we changed the entire dynamic of the film.

[00:24:53] [SPEAKER_05]: And we're left questioning our own assumptions about what's supposed to happen,

[00:24:57] [SPEAKER_05]: what's supposed, quote unquote, supposed to happen versus what really does.

[00:25:01] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know, do you have any thoughts about or have any back information about that scene, about why it was cut?

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think there are two scenes that are cut with Dallas and one of them is a sex scene with Dallas and Ripley,

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_02]: which is fantastically important to cut out.

[00:25:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And Ridley Scott said it was one of his favorite scenes but actually he understood that he had to cut that out

[00:25:24] [SPEAKER_02]: because that does completely undermine her iconic power actually and she does become a bit part in somebody else's story.

[00:25:34] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's that, and then there's also as you say this scene where Dallas is finally found

[00:25:39] [SPEAKER_02]: and we understand something about him being turned into this egg shape

[00:25:44] [SPEAKER_02]: so we understand a little bit more about the life cycle of the alien.

[00:25:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And then that also clipped out, he makes sometimes the decision to put it back into director's cuts,

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_02]: sometimes takes it out again the way that he does with the endless versions of films that he puts out.

[00:26:01] [SPEAKER_02]: But I think it's quite a good kind of again another edit, another occlusion,

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_02]: which leaves the kind of potential cliffhanger of the end much more powerful.

[00:26:11] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's also part of the brilliance of the film I think is just its leanness

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_02]: and its kind of forward thrust of the narrative.

[00:26:19] [SPEAKER_02]: So everything is kind of driving towards their end

[00:26:23] [SPEAKER_02]: so that there are none of these kind of pauses almost because that's what that is,

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_02]: it's a digression into another whole mythology which is then picked up later in other films.

[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, so that's why that was cut out I think.

[00:26:35] [SPEAKER_04]: It's really fascinating to me because as I said I saw these in my mid-teens I would say.

[00:26:40] [SPEAKER_04]: I say these when I mean Terminator 2 and Alien because of the female kind of like heroes in both of them.

[00:26:47] [SPEAKER_04]: And I'd never even considered that Dallas would come back and save her.

[00:26:51] [SPEAKER_04]: So when I read that I was like, oh yeah, because I'm watching all these films currently from 1920s, 1930s, 1940s

[00:26:56] [SPEAKER_04]: and the women are utterly useless in all of them but there's always a man there to come and save them.

[00:27:02] [SPEAKER_04]: So when I read that I was like that's really turning things around on its head from the kind of history that we've had before.

[00:27:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And also it's also this sense of an Agatha Christie plot because as they get killed off one by one

[00:27:15] [SPEAKER_02]: the whole trick of Agatha Christie is that actually one of them hasn't been killed

[00:27:19] [SPEAKER_02]: and you're supposed to be able to kind of detect which one it is.

[00:27:22] [SPEAKER_02]: So I think he's playing with the kind of Agatha Christie expectations of the slow kind of kill-off.

[00:27:28] [SPEAKER_02]: But again we've lost that sort of sense of its novelty I think because it's now so part of our DNA.

[00:27:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Interesting.

[00:27:35] [SPEAKER_05]: Let's talk a little bit about the xenomorph and the monster which has become such a nice piece of iconic,

[00:27:43] [SPEAKER_05]: can I say the word iconography in our world and about Giger and his art.

[00:27:51] [SPEAKER_05]: And Jason I'm sure like you just even the texture or the color of an alien appearing in anything.

[00:28:00] [SPEAKER_05]: I remember in one of the Predator movies there was an alien skull on the back of a ship and we all were like,

[00:28:06] [SPEAKER_05]: oh my you know it's such an embedded piece.

[00:28:09] [SPEAKER_05]: What have you looked at or thought about in terms of the life cycle of the xenomorph because it was a really unique invention

[00:28:18] [SPEAKER_05]: in terms of science fiction of the time wasn't it?

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Many things we say about the xenomorph itself.

[00:28:23] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean I think first of all just the horror aspect of not showing the monster too soon.

[00:28:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Good horror filmmaking, right?

[00:28:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly yeah just classic straight textbook but so necessary so impactful.

[00:28:39] [SPEAKER_01]: So when you do see the monster in all of its horrific glory it's that much more impactful.

[00:28:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Also just part of Giger's genius and again that was mentioned a lot of the design work including even the shape of the head of the xenomorph

[00:28:56] [SPEAKER_01]: comes from early drawings of the Harkinen palace for Jodorowsky's dune that Giger had done.

[00:29:03] [SPEAKER_01]: So again we were very lucky that Jodorowsky never got to make that film.

[00:29:09] [SPEAKER_01]: In some ways it might have been a fantastically brilliant film it might not have.

[00:29:16] [SPEAKER_05]: But it's sort of like a dandelion that sort of spawned all of these little seeds that floated out all over science fiction and other films.

[00:29:24] [SPEAKER_05]: I think you're right, I think we're lucky that didn't get made.

[00:29:28] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think also the fantastic about the xenomorph is how, what its life cycle is, how it reproduces.

[00:29:35] [SPEAKER_01]: The fact that it is in a sense parasitic on other life forms right from the facehugger having to inseminate to then using people and then

[00:29:45] [SPEAKER_01]: yeah that final image in the director's cut of Dallas and also being consumed to make new eggs.

[00:29:55] [SPEAKER_01]: And so then you go back to the original ship and you realize oh that's what happened to the crew of that ship.

[00:30:01] [SPEAKER_01]: They were basically consumed because that's how you get all the eggs on that ship.

[00:30:06] [SPEAKER_01]: So that's horrific as well, right?

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_01]: This whole notion of being eaten and eaten alive and consumed and your body being used.

[00:30:17] [SPEAKER_01]: That's why we consider and view sexual violation as something so horrific and not just a violation one's body but one's soul,

[00:30:29] [SPEAKER_01]: one's very being and when one's body is being infiltrated and used.

[00:30:35] [SPEAKER_01]: And of course we have all those various imagery, I'm sure we'll kind of talk about some of this but the mix of horror and sex, right?

[00:30:42] [SPEAKER_01]: So there's sex throughout this even with the deletion of that scene.

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh it was filmed and then never included, right?

[00:30:49] [SPEAKER_01]: In any of the versions.

[00:30:50] [SPEAKER_01]: So one says you have this desexualization of the characters but there's still sex throughout.

[00:30:57] [SPEAKER_01]: And that's just primal, just speaks to something in our lizard brain responses so to speak.

[00:31:05] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that just adds to the horror of how the xenomorph acts.

[00:31:11] [SPEAKER_05]: And I think something else that's also primal is the fact that it has new eyes.

[00:31:16] [SPEAKER_05]: And one of the ways that we as a mammalian species detect threat is by looking at faces and eyes and identifying the emotional state or the intent of another organism.

[00:31:29] [SPEAKER_05]: That's one of the things that kind of freaks people out about snakes and lizards and stuff like that is there's no eye muscle so we can't tell what the creature is feeling or thinking.

[00:31:37] [SPEAKER_05]: And Roger the xenomorph has no eyes, it has no empathy.

[00:31:42] [SPEAKER_05]: It is a perfect being right as Ash says.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_05]: So all the more terrifying.

[00:31:48] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know what you can illuminate for us a little bit about how Giger reached into this and what he was pulling from and how that then was folded in and developed into what we know now as the xenomorph.

[00:32:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean it's so fantastic.

[00:32:04] [SPEAKER_02]: The life cycle is so important that it's utterly incoherent, I think.

[00:32:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's partly because it's just this composite of lots of different designers actually because I mean Giger of course did the adult kind of version of this kind of creature.

[00:32:19] [SPEAKER_02]: But he confessed he couldn't do the kind of chest buster.

[00:32:23] [SPEAKER_02]: He had a version of that but he said famously it was like a plucked chicken and it just was not at all frightening.

[00:32:30] [SPEAKER_02]: So they brought in Roger Dickon, a different designer to kind of design that and then another special effects guy had been working on Star Wars came into those famous jaws that you know jaws within jaws that kind of animation all of that element.

[00:32:47] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's lots of people coming together but Giger's kind of central idea I think as soon as Dan O'Bannon showed Ridley Scott the painting by Giger Necronomic on four I think it is.

[00:32:59] [SPEAKER_02]: He just said that's it. That's it and it's it because it's got no eyes and therefore it can't kind of return the gaze.

[00:33:07] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's absolutely other, you know, you kind of look to the other to assert your selfhood and this is not going to do that.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_02]: All it's going to do is kind of annihilate you and kind of kick you off without a kind of ruthlessness.

[00:33:21] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think the other kind of element of this going in is that it's the idea of the parasitic wasp actually so that there are these really evil types of wasps that kind of do exactly what the alien does.

[00:33:38] [SPEAKER_02]: So inject you with kind of poison, plant eggs and then the egg slowly eat the caterpillars from inside until the very last moment when it kind of uses its jaws to kind of eat its way out.

[00:33:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's that actually that Charles Darwin famously wrote in a letter in 1860 saying I don't believe in God anymore because I've understood the life cycle of a wasp.

[00:34:02] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's like that who would create something like this.

[00:34:06] [SPEAKER_02]: So so yeah, absolute horror of it.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_02]: So so it's that kind of all of these elements kind of coming in and you can see this as a, you know, if you're a Freudian then you see this is all about sex as misunderstood as a kind of horrifying devouring of the other person.

[00:34:24] [SPEAKER_02]: You can see Darwin in it.

[00:34:27] [SPEAKER_02]: You can you can also even see Francis Bacon in it because I do think there is also these the fascination of Francis Bacon, the painter with open mouths screaming but he never was able to paint eyes so he just left the top of the face blank or just kind of fading away and clearly that extending jaw comes out of a famous 1945 painting by Francis Bacon.

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_02]: So there are so many elements thrown in and then just one final one, which is that the guy inside the adult.

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_02]: In that film is a six foot 10 tall newbion newbion.

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_02]: So he's an African actor and the sort of like a bodage.

[00:35:09] [SPEAKER_02]: That's right.

[00:35:10] [SPEAKER_02]: That's right.

[00:35:10] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's since passed away.

[00:35:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:35:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right.

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_02]: That sort of sense of the politics, the race politics of this as well being kind of bound up in this monster is so kind of rich and dense and incoherent really important.

[00:35:24] [SPEAKER_05]: Jason, you know, I think one of the things that was really fascinating for me to, you know, watching this film and watching it multiple times getting in preparation for all of our crossover activities and with alien Ramya is coming up was as a director Ridley Scott's just brilliant technique of constantly

[00:35:42] [SPEAKER_05]: confusing the visual space with the physiology of the monster and the mechanics and the mechanical nature of the ship that we're in.

[00:35:51] [SPEAKER_05]: So even in the last scene where Ridley's hide, I'm not really sorry, not Ridley Sigourney Weaver when Ripley is hiding in the spacesuit locker, which is directly out of the 1950s movie it's terror from the outer space, which is a real source material for Vannon.

[00:36:07] [SPEAKER_05]: But she's in there.

[00:36:09] [SPEAKER_05]: There are, you know, tubes and pipes and things like that that are so reminiscent of the alien physiology.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know that another director of science fiction at that time had really, I mean we had consistent language visual language across things.

[00:36:25] [SPEAKER_05]: But that was just a brilliant stroke that Ridley Scott did was to match the physical environment with the physiology of the alien.

[00:36:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:36:33] [SPEAKER_01]: No, I agree.

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not only allows for that surprise moment before Ridley or Ripley to runs into the locker where the alien is revealed to be on the escape shuttle.

[00:36:45] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think it's more than that, right?

[00:36:47] [SPEAKER_01]: It's showing that, you know, the monster in some sense is also us or more specifically our technology.

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think of a couple of philosophers have come to mind as we've been talking here.

[00:37:02] [SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, I'll talk about again the lack of eyes with the xenomorph, right?

[00:37:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Emmanuel Levinas, French Jewish philosopher talks about the face of the other as being the ground of our moral ability really morally to each other.

[00:37:15] [SPEAKER_01]: So as Roger mentioned, the alien comes across to a monster that is kind of just a soulless killing being and almost mechanical in that way, even though it's not, you know, it's a life form and highly intelligent.

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_01]: But it doesn't seem that way to us because we can't engage it face to face.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_01]: But then also, I think of Martin Heidegger, 20th century German philosopher wrote this famous essay called The Question Concerning Technology.

[00:37:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And he talks about how technology has its own impersonal logic that infrains us and whereas we invent technology with the understanding or the belief that we are the controllers.

[00:37:56] [SPEAKER_01]: We control technology. We use technology. In fact, technology comes to control us.

[00:38:01] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, how hard is it to ignore your cell phone when it vibrates?

[00:38:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Right? You know, it's just, again, the technology, you know, we become at service to it and we also become a piece of technology ourselves.

[00:38:16] [SPEAKER_01]: And again, this goes back to the whole corporate thing, right?

[00:38:18] [SPEAKER_01]: With, again, the crew, the Nostromo are just tools in the hands of the company.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the technology of mother and of course, Ash, I'll share with you, we'll talk more about Ash soon.

[00:38:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the technology is what's controlling things here.

[00:38:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Even though the alien, the monster is not itself a technological being, I think the visual chemistry of the ship and the aliens just basically to exemplify this idea that there's monstrosity surrounding the ship.

[00:38:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the technology of the ship and the aliens just basically to exemplify this entire crew.

[00:38:49] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's interesting because Ash is kind of set up as an opposition to the alien.

[00:38:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Like we don't know from the start that he's an android, which is one of the, again, spoilers, one of the surprises of the film.

[00:39:01] [SPEAKER_04]: But let's talk a bit more about Ash and how he represents a different kind of monster.

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Again, kind of like with the xenomorph, there's, Ash is very impersonal, right?

[00:39:13] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, androids typically don't experience emotions.

[00:39:18] [SPEAKER_01]: And again, for me personally, watching alien around the same time, I can't remember the exact age I was when I first saw it, but it's definitely been around the time where I'm also watching Star Trek the next generation.

[00:39:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And of course you have, you know, data who, again, an unemotional android, but on a quest to become human who wants to be that, who feels that becoming more human is his perfection.

[00:39:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And Ash is the flip side of that.

[00:39:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Ash views humans, again, there's this kind of, you know, almost disdain for his fellow crew members throughout.

[00:39:50] [SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of, again, annoyed by them throughout everything.

[00:39:53] [SPEAKER_01]: So again, is that a true emotion he's feeling or not?

[00:39:57] [SPEAKER_01]: Not really sure there.

[00:39:58] [SPEAKER_01]: But again, it's just cold, calculated and he's fulfilling his programming, right?

[00:40:03] [SPEAKER_01]: The company has programmed him to fulfill the end of safeguarding the xenomorph because of what it represents, what it could mean for the company as a resource.

[00:40:14] [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, Ash is attempting to control the xenomorph and so doing exerts this control over the crew.

[00:40:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of ways, again, going back to Heidegger, the crew has now become the tool of the technology that humans had invented.

[00:40:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Do you think there's something different once we realize he is an android?

[00:40:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Because obviously, he's a bad guy.

[00:40:35] [SPEAKER_04]: You get the feeling quite early on and then he's, you know, you know, he's up to something.

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_04]: He's acting very suspiciously.

[00:40:40] [SPEAKER_04]: And eventually when we find out that he's not a human, what kind of messaging do you think that gives us?

[00:40:48] [SPEAKER_01]: I think the main message to me is just the notion that just like with the xenomorph, you can't relate to this being.

[00:40:56] [SPEAKER_01]: You can't negotiate with them.

[00:40:59] [SPEAKER_01]: You can't get them to feel compassion for you.

[00:41:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, even before we know that Ash is an android, yeah, he's always acting sort of at a distance from the rest of the crew and just, yeah, it's kind of just emotionally unplugged, which of course there's a lot of humans that can be that way.

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not necessarily a bad thing, right?

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, emotional connection is something that is difficult for a lot of people.

[00:41:21] [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't make one, you know, a morally bad person at all.

[00:41:26] [SPEAKER_01]: But the thing with Ash is that even though he does have a face and does have eyes, his eyes are kind of cold, right?

[00:41:33] [SPEAKER_01]: You can't relate to him.

[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_01]: And that's part of what makes even relating to each other, you know, human-quad, human sometimes difficult.

[00:41:42] [SPEAKER_05]: Jason, I'm curious.

[00:41:43] [SPEAKER_05]: You study a little bit of ethics and in this allied field, the nature of not only mother, which has a whole weird psychosexual kind of thing, and the remote control, but then also with Ash, this is AI in the workplace.

[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_05]: And something that is sending cultural shockwaves across the globe right now is these large language models that we have.

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't think we're close to, you know, artificial general intelligence at this point.

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_05]: But LLMs are certainly here and present and they're suddenly popping up in our apps everywhere and everything.

[00:42:21] [SPEAKER_05]: Can you talk a little bit about the ethics of AI in a workplace environment?

[00:42:25] [SPEAKER_05]: And then what's that like where because, and this may or may not have been in the director's cut, I can't remember, but there's a scene where Ripley confronts Dallas and says, do you know Ash?

[00:42:37] [SPEAKER_05]: And he says, well, the company swapped him out two days before we flew out.

[00:42:41] [SPEAKER_05]: So the company knew and had already set this all up.

[00:42:44] [SPEAKER_05]: Something around the ethics there of how suddenly having AI in your workplace that is unbeknownst to you and it's controlling you.

[00:42:53] [SPEAKER_05]: And like you said with the Heidegger thing, we are the tool or we are the tool of the technology.

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so many roads we could go down here about a few things.

[00:43:01] [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, one of the biggest fears with AI is that it is going to lead to job loss.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And so going back to the original point, you know, when this film came out, it concerns about labor relations and so on.

[00:43:13] [SPEAKER_01]: The whole notion that people can become replaced by AIs.

[00:43:17] [SPEAKER_01]: And the sort of way it's when chat GPT-4 came on the scene, that kind of made everyone very conscious about the presence of AI.

[00:43:26] [SPEAKER_01]: But AI was already very much operative, especially in social media algorithms and so on.

[00:43:31] [SPEAKER_01]: And it was just more subtle. It was kind of hidden.

[00:43:34] [SPEAKER_01]: And so kind of the same way that that Ash, they didn't know he was an Android.

[00:43:39] [SPEAKER_01]: But one thing that's interesting, you know, with respect to the film,

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_01]: every time you rewatch a film, new things jump out at you.

[00:43:45] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that jumped out at me while I was rewatching Alien the other night was the fact that although they're surprised that Ash is an Android,

[00:43:53] [SPEAKER_01]: they're not surprised about the existence of androids.

[00:43:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like, oh, yeah, we know these things exist.

[00:44:00] [SPEAKER_01]: We know they're around and sometimes even look like people and they know how to reactivate them.

[00:44:05] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a shock like, oh my God, what is this thing?

[00:44:09] [SPEAKER_01]: It's, oh, it's just that we didn't know Ash was an Android.

[00:44:12] [SPEAKER_01]: So anyways, going back to larger point, I think that in terms of the ethics of AI and in terms of Ash himself being a malevolent character,

[00:44:23] [SPEAKER_01]: you know, there's an expression you often hear in the context of AI, of ethics and AI programming, garbage in, garbage out.

[00:44:30] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, AIs reflect us.

[00:44:32] [SPEAKER_01]: I remember some years back Twitter experimented with an AI Twitter avatar.

[00:44:37] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm bliking the name was it was it was Cassus Feminine and it was shut down in less than a day because he became basically super racist,

[00:44:46] [SPEAKER_01]: neo-Nazi, like, because she's just reflecting back what is in Twitter.

[00:44:51] [SPEAKER_01]: So I think what we need to, I think the interesting thing about reflecting on AI is how much AI reflects us.

[00:44:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And if we don't like what AI is doing, we need to turn the gaze back onto ourselves.

[00:45:04] [SPEAKER_04]: It's the old cliche again, isn't it?

[00:45:06] [SPEAKER_04]: The real monster is ass all along.

[00:45:08] [SPEAKER_04]: It's done quite well in that way.

[00:45:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Can I talk a bit about the scene which is really disturbing?

[00:45:12] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, there's all kinds of disturbing things in Alien.

[00:45:15] [SPEAKER_04]: And we've kind of skimmed over a lot of the kind of sexual stuff.

[00:45:17] [SPEAKER_04]: But the scene where Ash tries to orally rape Ripley with a magazine.

[00:45:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Now, if he's an Android and he's controlled by the company,

[00:45:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Brogier, what's that all about?

[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm really, really interesting listening to Jason because what strikes me is that the whole of the franchise really is a kind of

[00:45:39] [SPEAKER_02]: checking in on where we are with thinking about AI.

[00:45:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Because, you know, Alien is not about the word AI, probably not really kind of around very much.

[00:45:49] [SPEAKER_02]: And we're thinking about this as an Android, as a robot.

[00:45:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And therefore I think for a lot of the time for the film before you know he's an Android,

[00:46:01] [SPEAKER_02]: he looks like a kind of just one of those really, you know, beautiful,

[00:46:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I do everything that the managers say.

[00:46:09] [SPEAKER_02]: I know all of the rules off by heart.

[00:46:11] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to kind of, you know, just be completely conformist until he starts breaking the rules himself

[00:46:17] [SPEAKER_02]: and then you start sort of suspecting what's going on.

[00:46:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think the identification of Ash in that act of as you say kind of all-all rape

[00:46:27] [SPEAKER_02]: with what the face hugger does is a kind of sense of shifting where he's located in terms of this spectrum

[00:46:34] [SPEAKER_02]: of beings that we've got between biological, human and mechanical mother at the other end.

[00:46:41] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, so he's kind of that's a really key moment where he shifts place

[00:46:45] [SPEAKER_02]: and actually he is on the side of the alien.

[00:46:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, the rest of the series is kind of very, very ambivalent about what to do with these kinds of

[00:46:57] [SPEAKER_02]: partially autonomous androids.

[00:47:00] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, they become, Bishop becomes very sympathetic in the end, although we don't trust him for a lot of the film in Aliens.

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And then it shifts again with Prometheus and the character of David who's been given a little bit more autonomy

[00:47:15] [SPEAKER_02]: to become a little bit more human, but then only uses that to kind of advance a malicious agenda again.

[00:47:22] [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have two versions of that android in Covenant.

[00:47:27] [SPEAKER_02]: So where do we locate our kind of sympathies?

[00:47:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And it seems to me it's a series that tracks our ambivalence about this emergent technology.

[00:47:37] [SPEAKER_02]: That might be why it's also so powerful as a kind of cultural marker of how we feel about these issues.

[00:47:44] [SPEAKER_04]: And I read something in the wonderful book that you wrote about the decapitated head

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_04]: and the kind of history of heads speaking the truth.

[00:47:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:47:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I do love this moment.

[00:47:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Not only did they say, oh, he's an android,

[00:48:00] [SPEAKER_02]: who can always say, oh, we can plug his head back in and ask him some questions,

[00:48:04] [SPEAKER_02]: as if that's going to work.

[00:48:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so the idea of the kind of severed head or the mechanical device of a head that speaks the truth

[00:48:14] [SPEAKER_02]: goes back to kind of Greek myth and there are lots of kind of myths around certain scientists,

[00:48:22] [SPEAKER_02]: men of science, alchemists who worked endlessly on there,

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_02]: like Roger Bacon in the Elizabethan period.

[00:48:30] [SPEAKER_02]: These are kind of automata that nevertheless can speak the truth.

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_02]: So this idea of Ash's head being plugged in, again, it's called Ash as well,

[00:48:42] [SPEAKER_02]: which is this kind of mythological resonant name that takes us back to.

[00:48:47] [SPEAKER_02]: It's the ash tree that holds up the world in Nordic belief systems.

[00:48:52] [SPEAKER_02]: So this sort of idea of him being kind of connected back into a whole sort of resonant set of mythic tropes,

[00:49:00] [SPEAKER_02]: it's such a kind of rich text that Ridley Scott puts together for us to kind of investigate.

[00:49:06] [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, the idea of the severed head is something that is very iconic in literature and culture.

[00:49:11] [SPEAKER_04]: Interesting.

[00:49:12] [SPEAKER_04]: And he is a representation of the company, which is I think a huge part of the alien franchise.

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's one of those parts that I actually really love.

[00:49:22] [SPEAKER_04]: I really like when they kind of play up the whole company part.

[00:49:25] [SPEAKER_04]: What kind of, like, it's a very old kind of sci-fi trope is kind of the anti-authoritarian,

[00:49:32] [SPEAKER_04]: even in like Star Wars, the space opera, they're, you know, rebelling.

[00:49:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Can you talk a little bit more about why that company features and what it's trying to,

[00:49:41] [SPEAKER_04]: is there a kind of overlying moral that they're trying to explain?

[00:49:45] [SPEAKER_04]: Jason.

[00:49:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know in terms of the intentionality of the filmmakers, but I do think that, again,

[00:49:54] [SPEAKER_01]: it's sort of depersonalization, the reduction of human beings to disposable instruments.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it resonates again even more so as I said earlier, as we are dealing with

[00:50:04] [SPEAKER_01]: multinational corporations operating in a global economy where ultimately, and this

[00:50:10] [SPEAKER_01]: is it goes back to getting the industrial age, you're always trying to get the cheapest

[00:50:13] [SPEAKER_01]: labor possible and why we've had, you know, institutional slavery and so on throughout

[00:50:17] [SPEAKER_01]: human history.

[00:50:18] [SPEAKER_01]: And so once Henry Ford creates the assembly line and you've gone from artisans producing

[00:50:28] [SPEAKER_01]: things and again as John Locke fans have put it, mixing their being with their hands into

[00:50:36] [SPEAKER_01]: the earth and that's how you make something properly your own.

[00:50:41] [SPEAKER_01]: Now, everything's owned by another and you're just fulfilling one part usually doing a very

[00:50:46] [SPEAKER_01]: monotonous, boring thing going back to Darkstar, right?

[00:50:50] [SPEAKER_01]: You just bored people out in space doing the same thing over and over.

[00:50:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Even Star Trek, there's a great skit from the living color in the 90s, spoofing Star

[00:51:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Trek about how heroes just push them buttons all day, you know, and soon as just, you

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_01]: know, I'm tired of just driving the ship around.

[00:51:08] [SPEAKER_01]: I'd never get to go down to the planets and you get all the women captain and all this,

[00:51:11] [SPEAKER_01]: right?

[00:51:12] [SPEAKER_01]: So again, this is the whole idea that yeah, how do we make because in alien they're not

[00:51:17] [SPEAKER_01]: exploring space.

[00:51:18] [SPEAKER_01]: They're not going off to the final frontier.

[00:51:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Space is just their backyard, right?

[00:51:23] [SPEAKER_01]: There's no fascination with going to this alien planet, right?

[00:51:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And finding the ship again, Kane is exhibiting curiosity.

[00:51:31] [SPEAKER_05]: Can I just emphasize that point really quick, Jerry, since I already jumped in.

[00:51:34] [SPEAKER_05]: But when they discover the ship and they discover the engineer and when they're

[00:51:40] [SPEAKER_05]: dealing with the face hugger and then the, you know, the creature, they are never blown away

[00:51:45] [SPEAKER_05]: by it.

[00:51:46] [SPEAKER_05]: They're like, oh, isn't this interesting?

[00:51:48] [SPEAKER_05]: Oh, isn't that weird?

[00:51:49] [SPEAKER_05]: Ash even says, well, geez Ripley, we've never seen this thing before, but he says it

[00:51:54] [SPEAKER_05]: so mundanely.

[00:51:55] [SPEAKER_05]: So I just wanted to emphasize in point that they are expecting to discover stuff

[00:52:00] [SPEAKER_05]: in this world, even though they necessarily haven't.

[00:52:04] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's interesting because you mentioned Kane and Kane is the only one who seems to have

[00:52:07] [SPEAKER_04]: that kind of old school heroic thing.

[00:52:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Like he wants to go, he wants to be the first to go and explore.

[00:52:12] [SPEAKER_04]: He wants to find out, you know, he, I mean, curiosity killed the, well, it didn't kill

[00:52:17] [SPEAKER_04]: the cat, but it definitely killed the Kane.

[00:52:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:52:21] [SPEAKER_01]: So again, this all speaks to the fact and maybe this is maybe some of the critics

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_01]: back then had an issue with is that it is not a character driven film, right?

[00:52:30] [SPEAKER_01]: It's a, it's a plot driven film and the characters in a lot of ways are almost

[00:52:36] [SPEAKER_01]: incidental.

[00:52:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Although what I'll say as a fan of the film is I think the actors do a brilliant job

[00:52:42] [SPEAKER_01]: of imbuing color.

[00:52:45] [SPEAKER_01]: And first of all, I mean, Harry Dean stands one of my most favorite actors on the

[00:52:48] [SPEAKER_01]: planet.

[00:52:49] [SPEAKER_01]: He's the sea stand, you know, and he brings such subtlety to every role he does.

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Ferris Texas, right?

[00:52:56] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, my God, a film with very little dialogue and yet he brings so much to

[00:53:00] [SPEAKER_01]: that.

[00:53:01] [SPEAKER_01]: But it's not the same thing here with Brett.

[00:53:03] [SPEAKER_01]: But anyways, but going back to the company again, it's kind of, yeah, it's

[00:53:08] [SPEAKER_01]: the people are supposed to be bland in tools.

[00:53:12] [SPEAKER_01]: And again, just, you know, worker bees basically.

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, it's kind of the fits that they're sort of not reacting in a

[00:53:20] [SPEAKER_01]: way we would react if we were exploring this.

[00:53:22] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that that is part of the messaging of the film intended or not,

[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_01]: at least is how I'm receiving it.

[00:53:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:53:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And then I just add that in terms of the 1979 film, I mean, they're on a ship

[00:53:34] [SPEAKER_02]: called Nostromo and that is, you know, reference to Joseph Conrad, a novel

[00:53:41] [SPEAKER_02]: about mining in Latin America and this kind of colonial exploitation.

[00:53:46] [SPEAKER_02]: But it also, you know, Ridley Scott was interested at this time in doing

[00:53:50] [SPEAKER_02]: an adaptation of the Heart of Darkness.

[00:53:53] [SPEAKER_02]: It's just that Apocalypse Now beat into it so he couldn't do that.

[00:53:56] [SPEAKER_02]: But the company is the name that you get in the Belgian Congo in

[00:54:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Heart of Darkness and the company murdered four to seven million

[00:54:07] [SPEAKER_02]: people whilst expropriating, you know, rubber and so on from the slave

[00:54:13] [SPEAKER_02]: plantations that were set up in the Belgian Congo.

[00:54:16] [SPEAKER_02]: So you feel that there's kind of resonances here with a company that

[00:54:20] [SPEAKER_02]: is absolutely literally a slave driver and it does not care about

[00:54:25] [SPEAKER_02]: the kind of life of its expendable as they're called staff.

[00:54:31] [SPEAKER_02]: And so there's something, you know, really dark behind the first film.

[00:54:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And then again, you know, when you get to Aliens, it's much more of

[00:54:38] [SPEAKER_02]: a kind of corporate, overtly corporate greed and, you know, greed is good.

[00:54:42] [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like Gordon Gekko in space, isn't it?

[00:54:45] [SPEAKER_02]: With our sense of the open kind of capitalist greed that's behind that.

[00:54:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And the Wayland Corporation continues all the way through the series,

[00:54:54] [SPEAKER_02]: again, picking up different resonances at different periods of time

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_02]: and becoming an echo chamber for our culture, I think.

[00:55:02] [SPEAKER_05]: So we have to talk about the cat.

[00:55:06] [SPEAKER_05]: There's just no way around it.

[00:55:09] [SPEAKER_05]: The curiosity did not kill.

[00:55:11] [SPEAKER_04]: I needed the alien.

[00:55:12] [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. And I think that's one of the most interesting things.

[00:55:17] [SPEAKER_05]: I was rewatch over the last couple of days, kind of split it over and I was

[00:55:20] [SPEAKER_05]: watching that last night where the alien regards the cat or earlier on

[00:55:25] [SPEAKER_05]: the cat regards the alien as it kills Brett.

[00:55:30] [SPEAKER_05]: Roger, do you have any insight into what the cat represents?

[00:55:35] [SPEAKER_05]: Why did Oh Aisha, what are you?

[00:55:36] [SPEAKER_05]: What do you got?

[00:55:37] [SPEAKER_04]: I just want to say Roger definitely has some thoughts on this.

[00:55:41] [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing because it's such an inscrutable

[00:55:44] [SPEAKER_05]: part of the film and the plot.

[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_05]: But yet I think if somebody were to go do a cut and take the cat out,

[00:55:52] [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it's hard to know because I know what I know,

[00:55:54] [SPEAKER_05]: but would the film be diminished without the cat?

[00:55:57] [SPEAKER_05]: And I kind of have to come down on the side to say that there would be.

[00:56:02] [SPEAKER_05]: And there would be something that's...

[00:56:03] [SPEAKER_04]: There's two species on the ship as well.

[00:56:05] [SPEAKER_04]: So we need to take that integration.

[00:56:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:56:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.

[00:56:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And I love the detail that on the first day that Sigourney Weaver

[00:56:13] [SPEAKER_02]: encountered that cat, she had a horrific allergic reaction to it

[00:56:16] [SPEAKER_02]: and she went to her trailer and burst into tears because she thought

[00:56:21] [SPEAKER_02]: she was going to be fired because the cat was more important.

[00:56:24] [SPEAKER_02]: They had four identical cats.

[00:56:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Now actually, that tells you something about the importance of the cat.

[00:56:29] [SPEAKER_02]: So how about alien is actually about the cat surviving

[00:56:34] [SPEAKER_02]: and manipulating all of the humans around it.

[00:56:37] [SPEAKER_02]: That cat kills Brett very, very clearly.

[00:56:41] [SPEAKER_02]: It leads him into a place where he's going to get done by the alien

[00:56:47] [SPEAKER_02]: and then also puts Sigourney Weaver's character Ripley at completely

[00:56:53] [SPEAKER_02]: ridiculous risk for most of the last half hour in order to rescue this damn cat.

[00:56:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Who survives at the end?

[00:57:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's Ripley, but also the cat.

[00:57:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And the cat is the one who makes the sensible decision at the beginning of aliens.

[00:57:07] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going back there.

[00:57:09] [SPEAKER_02]: All you humans can if you like, but I'm staying here.

[00:57:12] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's what's sensitive of the cat being really crucial.

[00:57:15] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I've got all of this from the absolutely wonderful kind of writer

[00:57:19] [SPEAKER_02]: and critic, Ann Billson, who has this thing about cats in film

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_02]: and she wrote a brilliant point of view kind of version of alien

[00:57:28] [SPEAKER_02]: from the point of view of the cat.

[00:57:30] [SPEAKER_02]: So my day by Jones and that sense of what are these can openers as this cat

[00:57:37] [SPEAKER_02]: called humans?

[00:57:38] [SPEAKER_02]: What are these can openers doing?

[00:57:39] [SPEAKER_02]: It's like they're completely irrelevant.

[00:57:42] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's kind of a comic element to that, but also I think for me,

[00:57:47] [SPEAKER_02]: the relationship between humans and cats is symbiotic

[00:57:51] [SPEAKER_02]: and it's a cross species kind of symbiosis.

[00:57:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas the alien is this utter kind of Darwinian struggle other

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_02]: that you must exterminate and so on.

[00:58:02] [SPEAKER_02]: So there are models of how humans might relate to other species in here

[00:58:08] [SPEAKER_02]: and that's a kind of social interspecies connection

[00:58:11] [SPEAKER_02]: that you get between humans and cats.

[00:58:13] [SPEAKER_02]: The people who make alien franchises don't like dogs

[00:58:16] [SPEAKER_02]: because the dog is the one that releases the alien in Alien 3.

[00:58:20] [SPEAKER_02]: There's the dogs that carry the alien.

[00:58:22] [SPEAKER_02]: Never the cats.

[00:58:24] [SPEAKER_02]: So they're cat people.

[00:58:25] [SPEAKER_02]: So that's a sense of investigating.

[00:58:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's another part of the spectrum of being that's on Nostromo.

[00:58:32] [SPEAKER_02]: It's really interesting all the way from humans, cats, AI,

[00:58:38] [SPEAKER_02]: all the way up to this absolute other kind of monster.

[00:58:42] [SPEAKER_05]: And Jason, if we take the cat as a backdrop to help examine our humanity,

[00:58:47] [SPEAKER_05]: I don't think in science fiction anything like that has been done

[00:58:52] [SPEAKER_05]: necessarily either to really have something that in that way

[00:58:56] [SPEAKER_05]: that offsets our humanity.

[00:58:58] [SPEAKER_05]: I'm trying to think of, I'm racking my brain right now to think

[00:59:01] [SPEAKER_05]: of where we might have seen that before.

[00:59:03] [SPEAKER_05]: I know Obanin wanted to use the beach ball out of Darkstar

[00:59:08] [SPEAKER_05]: for something as a seed of something and obviously it became something else.

[00:59:11] [SPEAKER_05]: But I'm just trying to think in the rest of science fiction,

[00:59:14] [SPEAKER_05]: do we have that kind of relationship with another species

[00:59:18] [SPEAKER_05]: that helps to offset who we are in the face of this threat?

[00:59:23] [SPEAKER_05]: Or even just the fact that there's so much mundane stuff in this ship,

[00:59:29] [SPEAKER_05]: the little drinky bird things, pens and notepads and what else would

[00:59:35] [SPEAKER_05]: board truckers in space have but a cat.

[00:59:38] [SPEAKER_05]: So I don't know, I can't think of anything anywhere else in sci-fi

[00:59:42] [SPEAKER_05]: where we've seen anything just like that.

[00:59:44] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can't either.

[00:59:46] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just trying to think of the other example where even I have domesticated animals

[00:59:51] [SPEAKER_01]: and the one I could come up with is Jonathan Archer's Beagle

[00:59:54] [SPEAKER_01]: in Star Trek Enterprise.

[00:59:57] [SPEAKER_01]: Right, right.

[00:59:58] [SPEAKER_05]: I mean data had spots.

[01:00:00] [SPEAKER_05]: Oh that's right, data had spots, that's true, right?

[01:00:02] [SPEAKER_05]: That's well down the line.

[01:00:04] [SPEAKER_04]: I think I get the feeling Anne Billson will probably have a whole list

[01:00:07] [SPEAKER_04]: of cats for you.

[01:00:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Definitely.

[01:00:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I checked her out and she will know the full list of cats.

[01:00:13] [SPEAKER_04]: I'll try and add those in the show notes but yeah, it is an interesting choice.

[01:00:16] [SPEAKER_05]: But then going back to Joseph Conrad really quick

[01:00:19] [SPEAKER_05]: and with the Nostromo and the Sulaco and the Narcissus

[01:00:22] [SPEAKER_05]: like all of these, those names of ships all pulled from Conrad,

[01:00:26] [SPEAKER_05]: I suppose that that would have been a very common thing

[01:00:28] [SPEAKER_05]: to have a ship's cat from that.

[01:00:31] [SPEAKER_05]: And as I understand it, Ridley Scott was a big fan of Conrad

[01:00:36] [SPEAKER_05]: and it infuses a lot of stuff.

[01:00:37] [SPEAKER_05]: Even the movie's dualist has a bunch of Conrad influences in it.

[01:00:42] [SPEAKER_05]: So from that standpoint, having a ship's cat doesn't seem to be

[01:00:46] [SPEAKER_05]: out of the ordinary for this construction.

[01:00:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Well especially because it does harken back to sailing ships.

[01:00:54] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right, yeah exactly.

[01:00:55] [SPEAKER_01]: You catch the mice and so on.

[01:00:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the...

[01:01:00] [SPEAKER_01]: One thing, you know, Jones adds a tremendous amount of environmental color,

[01:01:06] [SPEAKER_01]: let's say.

[01:01:07] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that's a good point.

[01:01:08] [SPEAKER_01]: As a character, I think also what Jones represents is

[01:01:12] [SPEAKER_01]: that notion of being that operates on instinct.

[01:01:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Recent studies have shown that domesticated cats are closer

[01:01:22] [SPEAKER_01]: to their feral cousins than domesticated canines are.

[01:01:26] [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's the fact that it's a cat is also telling in that sense.

[01:01:30] [SPEAKER_01]: So you have this kind of, you know, yes Jones is domesticated,

[01:01:34] [SPEAKER_01]: but again more feral, more instinct driven.

[01:01:37] [SPEAKER_01]: You have the alien which seems to be that way,

[01:01:41] [SPEAKER_01]: but it's also clearly a much more intelligent being.

[01:01:45] [SPEAKER_01]: And then the humans are kind of in the middle.

[01:01:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And how the humans are operating based on vice or cowardice

[01:01:54] [SPEAKER_01]: or a type of courage that again has to sort of well up, right?

[01:02:01] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, to do the courageous act, right?

[01:02:02] [SPEAKER_01]: It's maybe not the most natural thing to do

[01:02:04] [SPEAKER_01]: or the curiosity that Kane shows.

[01:02:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think it's a reflection of humans that we're kind of...

[01:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we're intelligent creatures and we're capable of becoming, you know,

[01:02:15] [SPEAKER_01]: an alpha species, but we're also in certain contexts,

[01:02:19] [SPEAKER_01]: whether that's good or bad thing.

[01:02:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're also like cats.

[01:02:22] [SPEAKER_01]: We're on the same evolutionary spectrum

[01:02:24] [SPEAKER_01]: of very instinctively driven as creatures as well.

[01:02:28] [SPEAKER_04]: It is interesting because cats can be, as you said, extremely feral.

[01:02:32] [SPEAKER_04]: My cat once brought home four baby birds

[01:02:34] [SPEAKER_04]: and it was really, really disturbing for me.

[01:02:37] [SPEAKER_04]: So they can be really vicious and apparently

[01:02:39] [SPEAKER_04]: they're responsible for all kinds of, you know, creatures becoming extinct.

[01:02:44] [SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, it's interesting that we kind of go,

[01:02:47] [SPEAKER_04]: oh isn't it cute?

[01:02:48] [SPEAKER_04]: And you might...

[01:02:48] [SPEAKER_04]: The way you anthropomorphise a cat,

[01:02:50] [SPEAKER_04]: you're not going to do that to the alien.

[01:02:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Like they both have these very, very, as you've said,

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, these fierce kind of instincts.

[01:02:58] [SPEAKER_04]: But you know, we like cats, they're cute, they have eyes.

[01:03:00] [SPEAKER_04]: We can put our feelings of cuteness

[01:03:04] [SPEAKER_04]: and human emotions and feelings on them.

[01:03:06] [SPEAKER_04]: But you can't do that with a animal.

[01:03:08] [SPEAKER_05]: And I believe it's the wisdom we're sort of receiving now

[01:03:12] [SPEAKER_05]: from what Jason mentioned is the fact

[01:03:14] [SPEAKER_05]: that cats chose us, we didn't choose them.

[01:03:16] [SPEAKER_05]: We didn't domesticate them like we did dogs

[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_05]: or other animals, but they decided to hang out with us.

[01:03:23] [SPEAKER_05]: And so there's that borderline relationship.

[01:03:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Every cat owner knows that, right?

[01:03:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Which is the, you know, they'll put up with you for a bit

[01:03:30] [SPEAKER_02]: but you're largely a kind of side issue really.

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I do think if you watch that film again,

[01:03:36] [SPEAKER_02]: you know, the kind of indifferent eyes

[01:03:39] [SPEAKER_02]: of Jones as Brett is killed,

[01:03:42] [SPEAKER_02]: we do get a kind of close-up of this just indifferent face

[01:03:46] [SPEAKER_02]: watching the human being killed.

[01:03:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the alien does nudge the cat's box.

[01:03:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And again, that's another kind of plant about

[01:03:54] [SPEAKER_02]: is this going to be, you know,

[01:03:56] [SPEAKER_02]: the place where the alien kind of returns in the last scene?

[01:04:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Is this going to be the last kind of twist?

[01:04:02] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a sort of sense in which the cat

[01:04:05] [SPEAKER_02]: is being brought close possibly to the alien

[01:04:09] [SPEAKER_02]: but also close to express,

[01:04:12] [SPEAKER_02]: allow humans to express emotion and affection and so on.

[01:04:15] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a nice cusp animal between

[01:04:17] [SPEAKER_02]: both symbiosis with human beings

[01:04:21] [SPEAKER_02]: but also an absolute indifference to their fate,

[01:04:24] [SPEAKER_02]: which is what you see in Jonesy.

[01:04:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Very interesting.

[01:04:27] [SPEAKER_05]: Just really quick, I'm just curious,

[01:04:29] [SPEAKER_05]: is anybody on this podcast a fan of the Red Dwarf series

[01:04:33] [SPEAKER_05]: because they definitely play with the cat.

[01:04:36] [SPEAKER_06]: Yes, okay, good.

[01:04:37] [SPEAKER_05]: Because there's the cat.

[01:04:39] [SPEAKER_05]: Absolutely, absolutely.

[01:04:41] [SPEAKER_04]: Before we leave the cat

[01:04:43] [SPEAKER_04]: and move on to kind of rounding things off,

[01:04:46] [SPEAKER_04]: there's a very famous meme that I just wanted to read out

[01:04:48] [SPEAKER_04]: which is apparently a review

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_04]: that someone left for Alien

[01:04:52] [SPEAKER_04]: which is Alien is a movie

[01:04:54] [SPEAKER_04]: where nobody listens to the smart woman

[01:04:55] [SPEAKER_04]: and then they all die except for the smart woman

[01:04:58] [SPEAKER_04]: and her cat, four stars.

[01:05:00] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure you've seen this about.

[01:05:02] [SPEAKER_04]: I'll add it on Instagram.

[01:05:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they're all of the memes on Twitter

[01:05:07] [SPEAKER_02]: in the last couple of weeks

[01:05:08] [SPEAKER_02]: of all of these mad cat ladies.

[01:05:11] [SPEAKER_02]: It's fantastic because you just get lots of powerful shots

[01:05:15] [SPEAKER_02]: of Ripley.

[01:05:16] [SPEAKER_02]: It's brilliant.

[01:05:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so you're very good at coming up with philosophies,

[01:05:20] [SPEAKER_04]: aren't you, Jason?

[01:05:22] [SPEAKER_04]: So do you have a philosophy for the alien?

[01:05:25] [SPEAKER_01]: A philosophy for the alien.

[01:05:28] [SPEAKER_04]: No, I mean the film.

[01:05:30] [SPEAKER_04]: One of the films for the film.

[01:05:32] [SPEAKER_04]: The Alien Engine 79.

[01:05:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[01:05:35] [SPEAKER_01]: I would say...

[01:05:37] [SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, I will make a plug for a book

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_01]: that I was not involved in.

[01:05:42] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a self-promoting plug,

[01:05:43] [SPEAKER_01]: but there is a book called Alien and Philosophy.

[01:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: I invest, therefore I am.

[01:05:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And the collection of essays

[01:05:52] [SPEAKER_01]: exploring various philosophical themes

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_01]: throughout the Alien franchise.

[01:05:57] [SPEAKER_01]: For me personally, just thinking about the first film,

[01:06:00] [SPEAKER_01]: I do think it's sort of a cautionary tale

[01:06:03] [SPEAKER_01]: of humans just sort of blindly trying to manipulate

[01:06:08] [SPEAKER_01]: our environment.

[01:06:11] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, again, we made a lot of comparisons to Star Trek,

[01:06:14] [SPEAKER_01]: right?

[01:06:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Of course Star Trek has this prime directive

[01:06:17] [SPEAKER_01]: of non-interference with alien cultures,

[01:06:20] [SPEAKER_01]: which of course they break all the time,

[01:06:22] [SPEAKER_01]: otherwise you wouldn't have a TV show.

[01:06:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And same thing here, right?

[01:06:25] [SPEAKER_01]: In order to get a movie, you have to have Cain,

[01:06:27] [SPEAKER_01]: just the fact that the company sends them

[01:06:29] [SPEAKER_01]: to find the ship and Cain's walk around exploring.

[01:06:33] [SPEAKER_01]: They're just very careless

[01:06:35] [SPEAKER_01]: and there's this sort of sense of,

[01:06:37] [SPEAKER_01]: well, we're humans, we're fine, we got technology.

[01:06:41] [SPEAKER_01]: We can control the situation

[01:06:44] [SPEAKER_01]: as opposed to realizing,

[01:06:46] [SPEAKER_01]: no, maybe you're being controlled and manipulated.

[01:06:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And yes, we think about AIs,

[01:06:50] [SPEAKER_01]: we think about social media algorithms

[01:06:52] [SPEAKER_01]: and the way that technology can again

[01:06:54] [SPEAKER_01]: infringe us and exhibit control over us.

[01:06:59] [SPEAKER_01]: But also recognize that,

[01:07:00] [SPEAKER_01]: yeah, we kind of allow ourselves to be that

[01:07:02] [SPEAKER_01]: in our own hubris.

[01:07:03] [SPEAKER_01]: So again, classical Greek theme, right?

[01:07:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Narcissus, hubris, so on.

[01:07:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe that'll be the name of the next ship after Romulus.

[01:07:09] [SPEAKER_01]: We'll have to...

[01:07:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Brilliant.

[01:07:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Roger, do you think there's an overarching message

[01:07:17] [SPEAKER_03]: for the film?

[01:07:20] [SPEAKER_02]: That's pretty good what Jason was saying there.

[01:07:22] [SPEAKER_02]: I think this sort of sense of that word

[01:07:24] [SPEAKER_02]: inframing coming from a high-dugget

[01:07:26] [SPEAKER_02]: all the way from the set

[01:07:28] [SPEAKER_02]: where Ridley Scott said,

[01:07:30] [SPEAKER_02]: you never see ceilings inside the fiction film

[01:07:32] [SPEAKER_02]: so I put in lots of low ceilings.

[01:07:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And that sort of sense of they're all cramped inside

[01:07:36] [SPEAKER_02]: a very kind of confined technological space.

[01:07:39] [SPEAKER_02]: So there is something, I think,

[01:07:41] [SPEAKER_02]: that it's playing on around that idea

[01:07:43] [SPEAKER_02]: of technological kind of,

[01:07:46] [SPEAKER_02]: yeah, hubris or this Promethean idea,

[01:07:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I suppose, of you are toying with forces

[01:07:52] [SPEAKER_02]: that actually you don't comprehend

[01:07:55] [SPEAKER_02]: and you need to understand humans place

[01:07:58] [SPEAKER_02]: in a spectrum of beings.

[01:08:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Wonderful. I just wanted to add for anyone who...

[01:08:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know if the people listening,

[01:08:04] [SPEAKER_04]: you don't know what the Prime Director is

[01:08:06] [SPEAKER_04]: because most science fiction fans do,

[01:08:08] [SPEAKER_04]: but it's the idea that you do not go

[01:08:10] [SPEAKER_04]: and interfere in a planet

[01:08:13] [SPEAKER_04]: either for its environment or with the people

[01:08:16] [SPEAKER_04]: unless they are ready to,

[01:08:17] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, for space travel and stuff like that.

[01:08:20] [SPEAKER_04]: So I just wanted to add that in there.

[01:08:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so at the end of the show,

[01:08:24] [SPEAKER_04]: what I like to ask is,

[01:08:27] [SPEAKER_04]: is there anything you can recommend

[01:08:28] [SPEAKER_04]: for the listeners that they can pair with the alien?

[01:08:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Jason.

[01:08:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the main thing is, yeah,

[01:08:34] [SPEAKER_01]: the book I just recommended,

[01:08:35] [SPEAKER_01]: the Alien and Philosophy book,

[01:08:37] [SPEAKER_01]: there's tons of philosophy

[01:08:39] [SPEAKER_01]: that again we've talked a little bit about Levinas,

[01:08:42] [SPEAKER_01]: talked a little bit about Heidegger.

[01:08:43] [SPEAKER_01]: I think definitely Heidegger's essay,

[01:08:45] [SPEAKER_01]: The Question Concerning Technology.

[01:08:47] [SPEAKER_01]: If you're kind of scared of reading

[01:08:49] [SPEAKER_01]: German continental philosophy,

[01:08:52] [SPEAKER_01]: that's a very accessible Heideggerian essay.

[01:08:55] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not like a big book like Being in Time.

[01:08:57] [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, if you pick up Alien and Philosophy,

[01:08:59] [SPEAKER_01]: then it's great because the collection of essays,

[01:09:02] [SPEAKER_01]: so you just kind of read whichever ones

[01:09:04] [SPEAKER_01]: you think might be eventually about to read it cover to cover.

[01:09:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And the authors of those essays will lead you

[01:09:10] [SPEAKER_01]: to some of the deeper first person

[01:09:12] [SPEAKER_01]: philosophical explorations

[01:09:15] [SPEAKER_01]: that again, Great Sci-Fi reflects back onto us.

[01:09:19] [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's even talking about today,

[01:09:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Alien is why we're talking about it

[01:09:22] [SPEAKER_01]: so many years, decades later

[01:09:24] [SPEAKER_01]: and why there are still films coming out.

[01:09:25] [SPEAKER_01]: It says something to us about us

[01:09:27] [SPEAKER_01]: and that's what we find interesting

[01:09:29] [SPEAKER_01]: as well as just being a great horror flick.

[01:09:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Brilliant. Roger?

[01:09:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'd recommend a short story by Octavia Butler,

[01:09:37] [SPEAKER_02]: the African-American science fiction writer called Blood Child,

[01:09:41] [SPEAKER_02]: which she wrote about five years after Alien came out.

[01:09:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a rewrite of Alien basically,

[01:09:47] [SPEAKER_02]: but this time the humans and the aliens,

[01:09:50] [SPEAKER_02]: they do implant the humans

[01:09:52] [SPEAKER_02]: and they do screech their way out of bodies,

[01:09:56] [SPEAKER_02]: but that's understood.

[01:09:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a symbiotic and loving relationship

[01:10:00] [SPEAKER_02]: that's developed between these species.

[01:10:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And the aliens are very kind of delighted

[01:10:06] [SPEAKER_02]: and very supportive of the humans

[01:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: who are willing to submit to this kind of process

[01:10:11] [SPEAKER_02]: and it becomes a very loving kind of connection.

[01:10:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think what that points towards

[01:10:15] [SPEAKER_02]: is a kind of different understanding,

[01:10:18] [SPEAKER_02]: a potential understanding

[01:10:20] [SPEAKER_02]: of relationship between self and other

[01:10:22] [SPEAKER_02]: or between human and alien,

[01:10:24] [SPEAKER_02]: which doesn't have to be one of utter all-out war

[01:10:27] [SPEAKER_02]: but can be symbiotic.

[01:10:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's lots of science fiction

[01:10:32] [SPEAKER_02]: and lots of horror that are exploring that idea

[01:10:35] [SPEAKER_02]: as opposed to the really cruel Darwinian struggle

[01:10:39] [SPEAKER_02]: for existence that's in Alien 79.

[01:10:41] [SPEAKER_02]: So I'd recommend that as a rewrite.

[01:10:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Wonderful.

[01:10:44] [SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, I'll just add

[01:10:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a very important message

[01:10:46] [SPEAKER_01]: as we think about our relationship to other species,

[01:10:49] [SPEAKER_01]: to our natural environment.

[01:10:51] [SPEAKER_04]: Great, thank you.

[01:10:52] [SPEAKER_04]: David, we're co-hosting,

[01:10:54] [SPEAKER_04]: but would you like to recommend something for the listeners?

[01:10:56] [SPEAKER_05]: I absolutely do have a thing.

[01:10:58] [SPEAKER_05]: So I've got multiple tabs open on my browsers already

[01:11:01] [SPEAKER_05]: for the Heidegger article,

[01:11:03] [SPEAKER_05]: The Living Color,

[01:11:05] [SPEAKER_05]: Spoof My Day by Jones the Cat,

[01:11:07] [SPEAKER_05]: and of course Blood Child.

[01:11:08] [SPEAKER_05]: So thank you for those.

[01:11:10] [SPEAKER_05]: I would recommend three films.

[01:11:13] [SPEAKER_05]: I would recommend It, Terror from Beyond Space.

[01:11:16] [SPEAKER_05]: I absolutely love that,

[01:11:17] [SPEAKER_05]: which is something you recommended to me.

[01:11:19] [SPEAKER_05]: It was so much fun.

[01:11:20] [SPEAKER_05]: It was, it's a lot of fun.

[01:11:21] [SPEAKER_05]: It's very of its time period,

[01:11:23] [SPEAKER_05]: but if you're interested in the roots of this film,

[01:11:25] [SPEAKER_05]: you can really see it.

[01:11:26] [SPEAKER_05]: Everything down to the compartment ladders

[01:11:28] [SPEAKER_05]: that change decks to

[01:11:30] [SPEAKER_05]: the whole idea of blow it out of the airlock.

[01:11:32] [SPEAKER_05]: It was a primary source for Dan O'Bannon.

[01:11:36] [SPEAKER_05]: The next thing I would say is

[01:11:38] [SPEAKER_05]: Ridley Scott's first directorial feature film,

[01:11:41] [SPEAKER_05]: which is the do list.

[01:11:43] [SPEAKER_05]: And if you want to see the DNA

[01:11:45] [SPEAKER_05]: that Ridley was coming out,

[01:11:47] [SPEAKER_05]: DNA is not the right word.

[01:11:48] [SPEAKER_05]: They learned cinematography

[01:11:51] [SPEAKER_05]: that Ridley Scott had

[01:11:52] [SPEAKER_05]: because he had made thousands of TV commercials

[01:11:54] [SPEAKER_05]: prior to this.

[01:11:55] [SPEAKER_05]: And so he made the do list

[01:11:58] [SPEAKER_05]: off of his own sweat.

[01:12:00] [SPEAKER_05]: Nobody was coming knocking on his door.

[01:12:02] [SPEAKER_05]: So he's like, I'm going to make a movie.

[01:12:03] [SPEAKER_05]: So he makes the do list.

[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_05]: Watch that for the cinematography

[01:12:07] [SPEAKER_05]: because you can really see the roots of Alien

[01:12:10] [SPEAKER_05]: in the visual language that he uses,

[01:12:12] [SPEAKER_05]: which is so important to the storytelling of Alien

[01:12:14] [SPEAKER_05]: is how he uses the camera

[01:12:17] [SPEAKER_05]: as as much as what he puts in front of camera.

[01:12:20] [SPEAKER_05]: And then for the third thing,

[01:12:21] [SPEAKER_05]: I would definitely recommend Dark Star,

[01:12:23] [SPEAKER_05]: which is an absolute crazy 70s hoot of a film.

[01:12:28] [SPEAKER_05]: It has a very different sensibility.

[01:12:30] [SPEAKER_05]: So I would say be careful,

[01:12:33] [SPEAKER_05]: not be careful when you watch it.

[01:12:34] [SPEAKER_05]: Just go in knowing what you're watching.

[01:12:36] [SPEAKER_05]: You're not watching something that is a modern sensibility,

[01:12:38] [SPEAKER_05]: but something very much a student film

[01:12:40] [SPEAKER_05]: shot by Carpenter,

[01:12:42] [SPEAKER_05]: written and acted in by O'Bannon.

[01:12:44] [SPEAKER_05]: And it is a very funny film

[01:12:47] [SPEAKER_05]: if you can see the humor in it.

[01:12:49] [SPEAKER_05]: But it really does as Roger was saying earlier that these are

[01:12:52] [SPEAKER_05]: what do human beings do when they're bored in space?

[01:12:56] [SPEAKER_01]: And I have one more recommendation

[01:12:58] [SPEAKER_01]: that gets something we've referenced,

[01:12:59] [SPEAKER_01]: but just in case people aren't aware

[01:13:02] [SPEAKER_01]: the documentary about the Yoderoski's dude.

[01:13:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. Oh, yes.

[01:13:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I was getting a quick one.

[01:13:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. That's a great film.

[01:13:09] [SPEAKER_02]: That's a really great film.

[01:13:10] [SPEAKER_05]: I really want the book.

[01:13:12] [SPEAKER_05]: I really want the book that they made for Yoderat for that.

[01:13:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Which is only like five in existence or something like that.

[01:13:18] [SPEAKER_05]: I believe somebody's bought the rights,

[01:13:20] [SPEAKER_05]: and I don't know there's some haggling or negotiation

[01:13:23] [SPEAKER_05]: concurrently right now

[01:13:24] [SPEAKER_05]: that maybe somebody's trying to get it produced

[01:13:26] [SPEAKER_05]: because somebody other than the previous rights owner

[01:13:29] [SPEAKER_05]: owns it now.

[01:13:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Brilliant.

[01:13:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. Thank you so, so much for coming on guys.

[01:13:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. That's been great.

[01:13:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having us.

[01:13:36] [SPEAKER_01]: I gotta go Roger's book now.

[01:13:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. I really enjoyed this Roger.

[01:13:42] [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't think I'd enjoy it that much.

[01:13:44] [SPEAKER_04]: I like the fact you've got little funny bits in there as well.

[01:13:47] [SPEAKER_04]: So, a serious academic Roger.

[01:13:51] [SPEAKER_04]: That's it for this episode.

[01:13:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Next episode,

[01:13:54] [SPEAKER_04]: I will be speaking to two wonderful guests

[01:13:56] [SPEAKER_04]: about a lost pioneer

[01:13:58] [SPEAKER_04]: of 19th century science fiction literature,

[01:14:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Robert Duncan Milne.

[01:14:03] [SPEAKER_04]: We'll find out why his work

[01:14:04] [SPEAKER_04]: slips through the cracks of history and San Francisco.

[01:14:08] [SPEAKER_04]: And David, what are you and the law hands up to?

[01:14:11] [SPEAKER_05]: Well, we're going to be doing a review

[01:14:13] [SPEAKER_05]: of the new Alien Romulus movie

[01:14:16] [SPEAKER_05]: about a week after it releases.

[01:14:20] [SPEAKER_05]: So look for that coverage

[01:14:21] [SPEAKER_05]: as well as our coverage of

[01:14:24] [SPEAKER_05]: the 45th anniversary of the film Alien,

[01:14:27] [SPEAKER_05]: which is sort of a companion to this podcast.

[01:14:30] [SPEAKER_05]: Otherwise, we're just rolling off our weekly coverage

[01:14:32] [SPEAKER_05]: of the acolyte and of House of the Dragon season two.

[01:14:36] [SPEAKER_05]: But we're about to start up coverage

[01:14:38] [SPEAKER_05]: of season two of the Rings of Power.

[01:14:40] [SPEAKER_05]: And then later in the fall,

[01:14:41] [SPEAKER_05]: we're going to be covering Agatha all along

[01:14:43] [SPEAKER_05]: as well as Dune prophecy.

[01:14:46] [SPEAKER_05]: You can visit us on our website,

[01:14:48] [SPEAKER_05]: the lawhounds.com.

[01:14:49] [SPEAKER_05]: And you can join us on our discord server.

[01:14:51] [SPEAKER_05]: We've got a great community of human beings

[01:14:54] [SPEAKER_05]: where you can talk and hang out

[01:14:57] [SPEAKER_05]: and nerd out about all the shows

[01:14:58] [SPEAKER_05]: and the movies and books that you love.

[01:15:00] [SPEAKER_05]: We've got a great mod team.

[01:15:02] [SPEAKER_05]: It's a really supportive and fun community.

[01:15:05] [SPEAKER_05]: Aisha, you're there as well.

[01:15:06] [SPEAKER_05]: So I'd invite you to check us out there.

[01:15:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Absolutely.

[01:15:09] [SPEAKER_04]: And you can find out more about me

[01:15:11] [SPEAKER_04]: and the podcast at everycififilm.com.

[01:15:14] [SPEAKER_04]: And please do remember to like,

[01:15:16] [SPEAKER_04]: subscribe and share.

[01:15:17] [SPEAKER_04]: And if you have time,

[01:15:19] [SPEAKER_04]: a rating or review really helps out both me and David.

[01:15:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.

[01:15:23] [SPEAKER_00]: The Lorehounds podcast is produced

[01:15:25] [SPEAKER_00]: and published by the Lorehounds.

[01:15:27] [SPEAKER_00]: You can send questions and feedback

[01:15:28] [SPEAKER_00]: and voicemails at

[01:15:30] [SPEAKER_00]: thelorehounds.com.

[01:15:33] [SPEAKER_00]: Get early and ad free access

[01:15:34] [SPEAKER_00]: to all Lorehounds podcasts at patreon.com.

[01:15:38] [SPEAKER_00]: Any opinions stated are ours personally

[01:15:40] [SPEAKER_00]: and do not reflect the opinion of

[01:15:42] [SPEAKER_00]: or belong to any employers or other entities.

[01:15:44] [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.