Rocketsmoke

by David Benjamin

“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”
—Ash (Ian Holm), Alien

MADISON, Wis.—When I was in high school, writing stories for an underground literary magazine called The Id, I took a stab at science fiction. The resulting story involved two alien creatures masquerading as humans, who hid huge phallic stingers beneath their Levis.

The story turned out worse than the premise suggests. I kept it out of The Id, set it aside and let it die of shame. Since then, as much as I’ve always enjoyed sci-fi movies, I’ve been suspicious of this discipline as literature—with a few significant exceptions for some of my storytelling heroes, like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. In an almost instinctive choice, I decided to focus my prose on the terrestrial human condition. My sense has always been that real life, as a substrate for fiction, is deeper, richer, more complicated and challenging than depicting imaginary—but tellingly familiar—worlds “where no man has gone before.”

I also had the feeling that reality better suits my sense of humor. Sci-fi conveys a mood largely serious and often dystopian. The most celebrated violation of this norm is the nightclub scene in Star Wars. Also, among my sci-fi favorites is an obscure spoof of the genre,The Ice Pirates, in which a starship—navigating the far reaches of a Mad Max universe—is infested with “space herpes.”

Sci-fi is relatively new among the narrative concepts of literature. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 gave cautious birth to the genre. Thirty years later, H.G. Wells expanded the possibilities of sci-fi with a clash between human and alien forces in War of the Worlds. Then, on Halloween 1938, Orson Welles changed the genre forever with a Mercury Theatre dramatization of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion so vivid and convincing that people fled their homes and ran panic-stricken in the streets.

Orson Welles had to apologize for turning alien terror into entertainment, but Hollywood took notice. As soon as World War II ended, movie studios expanded their fear franchise from creature features—Frankenstein, mummies, werewolves and spooks—to invasions from beyond—Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day of the Triffids, Teenagers from Outer Space. The Cold War gave cinematic birth to mutant creatures spawned by the Bomb—Them (giant ants), Rodan (a pterodactyl the size of a city bus), The Deadly Mantis and, of course, Godzilla. In those days, special effects tended to be cut-rate and primitive. Obviously, Godzilla was a stunt man in a rubber suit. But I was a kid with a rabid willingness to suspend disbelief. So, I loved that stuff.

Now, with computer graphics, green screens and digital animation, special effects are awesomely realistic. Ray Harryhausen, the godfather of FX, is smiling in his grave. Nevertheless, the narrative essence of sci-fi hasn’t followed a similar evolution. It remains reliably formulaic. Critics have identified two basic leitmotifs for human interaction with extraterrestrial beings. One is the religious school in which earthlings experience a spiritual, usually psychedelic, union with aliens—typically harmless naked androgynes with huge almond eyes—who are always far more advanced than humans. 2001: A Space Odyssey was seminal. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact and Interstellar follow the formula.

One of my favorite sci-fi flicks, The Fifth Element, cleverly combines this devotional style with the good old-fashioned martial formula of Wells and Welles. In Luc Besson’s story, humanity’s destruction can only be prevented by the intercession of a sort of virgin demigoddess (Mila Jovovich in a seriocomic tour de force) sprawled on an altar and offered up to the elemental forces of the universe.

Cool.

Whether the close encounter involves war or peace, the Earth depicted in most sci-fi stories tends to be a ravaged skull plagued by pollution, smoke-choked darkness, rampant crime and universal poverty, ruled over by a murderous clique of cloistered sociopaths. Science fiction’s vision of the future is consistently bleak. We’re all flying off to Hell together in Flash Gordon’s rocket ship.

But I overstate. One reason I dismissed sci-fi as a medium for my own writing was its superficial approach to society’s intricacies, travesties and surprises. While sci-fi technologies carry humanity implausibly beyond our current capabilities, the governing infrastructure of this brave new world is little more than a hasty backdrop, a scrim, behind the stage. The “Federation” in the Star Trek franchise, for example, has been on screen for sixty years, but we don’t know if this imaginary polity has elections, a president, a congress or a constitution. In Star Wars, a galaxy far, far away—with the technology to fly its spaceships at the speed of light and obliterate entire planets with energy beams—is stuck in a medieval political culture of monarchy, empire and superstition so atavistic that it predates the Magna Carta.

In the Alien franchise—whose first two installments are among my favorite flicks—the future Earth appears to be ruled by a misanthropic “corporation” whose archetype is a smarmy conniver (Paul Reiser). His fealty to a vague and distant board of directors supersedes the lives of his fellow astronauts and the very fate of humanity. Somehow, before the Nostromo took flight, Earth lost all hope of ordaining and establishing liberty, equality and fraternity. The story offers no hint of how and why this collapse of civilization happened.

But, what the hell. That’s not important. We’re lost in space, where life boils down to a simple, grossly uneven battle against a monster—or a bunch of them—with stiletto claws, a whole bunch of tentacles and lots of legs, at least two mouths bristling with fangs and acid in its veins instead of blood.

In the first Alien films, conveniently and predictably, this war-of-the-worlds reaches a climax as old as Beowulf vs. Grendel or Holmes wrestling with Professor Moriarty on the cliff atop Reichenbach Falls. In Aliens, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the last unscathed survivor of the obligatory sci-fi movie bloodbath. By the film’s climax, Ripley has evolved into a macho-feminist goddess, in mortal combat against the mother of all monsters. The outcome, of course, is foreordained. But it also leaves an opening for an endless flow of prequels, sequels and Asimov-deviant cyborgs.

Ripley vs. the Bitch-Beast of LV-426 summons up a similar duel in a vastly different sci-fi flick, Back to the Future III, in which Marty (Michael J. Fox) is forced into a gunfight with Mad Dog Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). This scene, played for laughs, likewise summons the hundreds of humorless gunfights in Hollywood’s century-old archive of Western film, from The Great Train Robbery in 1903 to Django Unchained.

Ripley’s battle with the ultimate alien evokes Marty’s shootout (parodying A Fistful of Dollars), and—for good measure—Randy Quaid’s sacrificial plunge into the rectum of the giant saucer in Independence Day. Despite their seeming differences, these similar scenes summon the dread suspicion that most of the adventures we keep recounting, and the movies we keep making, haven’t evolved much since 1903. Sci-fi or earthbound, they all reprise the tableau of a good guy (or girl) poised with a six-shooter (or light sword) against a bad guy (or monster) on the dusty streets of Dodge City.

Replace Matt Dillon with Han Solo and call it “Rocketsmoke.”