A 19-year-old asshole sees "Alien" for the first time [Updated]

It's difficult to really formulate, in one's memory, just how that quality we now know as "buzz" was generated in the days before this mess we're all in now, but my recollection is that Alien DID indeed have some buzz about it before opening, despite the fact that it was a film that had no stars and its director was a relatively unknown quality. I and my collegiate pals were somewhat aware of The Duellists, but hadn't actually seen it. But we did know that this picture was coming and it was supposed to be something. There was a production story about it in the issue of Rolling Stone dated May 31st, which would have been on newsstands about a week before the film's May 25th, 1979 opening (Wenner's magazine was then, as now, a biweekly). I'm not sure if we had seen it or not.

But for whatever reason I was there for it on the afternoon of the opening day at the then-majestic (and now completely nonexistent) Stanley Warner Theatre on Route 4 in Paramus, N.J. Among my "posse" was the now-infrequent-SCR-chimer-in Joseph Failla, who's been my moviegoing companion since third grade, and My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, soon to be the keyboard player and composition maestro of the now-reformulated Haledon rock legends Artificial Intelligence. We went in with a very "bring it" attitude. And I left with the conviction that it had not, in fact, been broughten. 

I'm not entirely certain whether or not I was under the influence of cannabis during the viewing (it's not unlikely, frankly) but I can tell you I was feeling pretty feisty. When the spawn of the face-sucker burst out of John Hurt's chest, unhinged its jaw, screeched, and scurried away, I actually tittered, and then sputtered, rather loudly, and with no small amount of what I then considered punk-rock indignation, "It's the Eraserhead baby with teeth!" Yes, I was pretty much the guy that you and everybody else in the sentient movie-viewing universe wants to pummel. And when the picture was over, I shrugged and seethed "That's IT?" My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ semi-fumed "It's just a slicker remake of X! The Terror From Beyond Space." And then we all went to the Forum diner and then maybe back to Ron's parents' place in Clifton to listen to King Crimson's Red and watch the pretty blue volume-level lights on his amplifier, or something. 

I did not write up Alien for my college paper, thank God, or doubtless I would have puked up something daringly righteous and contrarian and dumb. I was 19 years old and although some will attest that I was a nice and amusing and even charming fellow on some levels, I was also an opinionated loudmouth asshole who thought he knew everything and that if you didn't grok Henry Cow you were an individual of entirely subpar intelligence and not much worth my time. (Of course I was also canny enough not to play Henry Cow records for all that many of the women I dated, but we'll get into that some other time.) I did not really come around to Alien until maybe the mid-80s. What turned me around was...well, it was a few things. I saw more movies, learned about form, and started—I can't emphasize enough the importance of that verb being "started"—to try and look at movies with respect to what was actually on the screen and with less of an urge to outsmart what I was looking at. The evolution of home video was one of the factors that turned Alien into an enduring classic rather than a sleeper hit. The respect it was accorded by subsequent acquaintances who clearly knew better than I did was also influential. For instance, Michael Weldon in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: "Of course it's an expensive B-movie, but it's also fascinating, well-made, and the scariest science-fiction film in ages." (Interestingly, though, as B-movies go, it wasn't THAT expensive. Still. Michael was conversant with the work of Andy Milligan.) I've since rewatched it, enjoyed it, and been frightened by it, a number of times. But I have to confess I felt no reverence to it on my first. 

Point being? I'm not entirely sure. Except that when the next Alien comes around, it's not going to be made by the people who made the first Alien. It's gonna have been made by a bunch of people we're not all that familiar with. And when and if it comes around, I hope I have the eyes to see it for what it is, and if not quite that, to actually enjoy it. 

UPDATE: The aforementioned Mr. Joseph Failla has some thoughts for me, and you:

I can excuse your rambunctious outbursts at that first screening of ALIEN as your way of dealing with the unbearable tension the film had generated right from the start. Even though there was a strong buzz before the film had opened (I remember months prior to it's premiere, a huge black and white Times Square billboard featuring unusual art work not featured in any of the later advertisements), nothing we read or came across prepared us for that opening day experience. The now defunct Stanley Warner theater in Paramus was Bergen County's choice showplace and largest available screen, so we could not have picked a better locale to see it with hundreds of other nervous viewers. You may have been louder than the rest of us with your reactions but I think we were all caught up with the film's unpredictability that kept us guessing what was coming next. 

Up to this point, '70s science fiction extravaganzas had been presented clean and colorful (only one episode of STAR WARS had yet been released and the visitors of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS were friendly, benign beings) but ALIEN was different, it was cold, cruel and grim, it presented a nightmarish, unrelenting creation that had no apparent weakness. As BLADE RUNNER was still a few years away, ALIEN became the closest film companion we had to our copies of Heavy Metal magazine. Much of the credit for ALIEN's uniqueness has to go to H.R. GIGER (or to those who had the genius to bring him on board to design the alien planet and it's title character), the movie's completely original organic look had me fascinated from the start and here is where comparisons to earlier B-movies cease to ring true (although I'd like to cite writer Dan O'Bannon's low budget DARK STAR as a more immediate inspiration). Actually, if I had any concerns at all, was that the film's first half (climaxing with the still wrenching chest bursting scene) is so gorgeously grotesque in depicting an alien environment, overshadowed the later portions when it becomes a game of cat and mouse between the alien and the diminishing number of crew members onboard the cargo ship Nostromo. However I've amended that opinion somewhat as I now find the most agonizing sequence to watch is Captain Dallas' demise (or disappearance depending on which version you're watching) in the air shaft where the creature silently stalks him in the dark. The suspense here is truly palpable as we sense the alien closing in and hear Dallas' pleas to be taken the hell out of there! A supremely terrifying moment that has yet to be duplicated in any of the followup installments.

So while I've not seen PROMETHEUS yet, I'm approaching it with a certain amount of caution as ALIEN was always the kind of act that was virtually impossible to follow. Of all the sequels only ALIENS works for me as a release of the first film's tautness but at the same time seems to exist in a completely different universe with Ripley emerging as one of the '80s most trustworthy action heroes. Over time ALIEN itself has been idolized, sanitized and popularized out of proportion but I still regard it today as the nuts and bolts of sci-fi/horror. I feel it's only fitting for Scott to revisit his terror classic with a fresh take but I can't say he did the original any favors by re-editing it some years back, quickening the pace of the eerily atmospheric first half and then bringing the excitement to a halt with the once deleted "cocoon scene" in the second just when it needs to keep moving (a point he had defended up until this version). I questioned his hindsight then and wonder where he's coming from now bringing a whole new mythology into play that was never part of ALIEN's sleek streamlined plan. No, I never worried what part the "space jockey" played in all this, I considered him a curious mystery that was best not explained (nor do I ask who the giant skeleton belongs to in PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) but I do question if it will be worth sacrificing Del Toro's pet MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS project for PROMETHEUS? I mean if the main stumbling block preventing Del Toro from seeing this through was too large a budget for an R rated film, there was always a chance he would one day take another swipe at it but with PROMETHEUS treading the same ground, will he ever again feel MOUNTAINS worth the effort to realize?

Comments

[Josh Z]

@Don, as LondonLee posted above, even if Ridley Scott didn't fully intend all the sexual imagery in Alien, H.R. Giger certainly did. I'd have to imagine that Scott was aware of what Giger was doing and agreed to go along with it, even if it wasn't his idea first.

Considering that Scott's new prequel features a scene where a not-subtle-at-all albino penis hisses at two of the characters, I'd say that he's fully on board with the sexual imagery in the series now.

[Shane]

@Josh - I had to laugh at that scene (stupid character actions aside) when the Rafe Spall character says 'clearly it's a girl' ...?...I looks like a big penis!

[jim emerson]

Love this, Glenn. You inspired me to add something about it to my own post, since my first encounter with "Alien" was memorable in a totally different way... (P.S. I'm usually well-behaved once the lights go down, but I'm horrified to think of the pompous windbaggery I released into the air before the movie started and after it was over, just for the sake of making conversation...)

[jim emerson]

Just read some of the other comments and would like to chime in:

Shane: "You just make the movie, I'll tell you what it's about." True! Any filmmaker can tell you that's true of all audiences, not just critics. Once the movie is released, it no longer belongs to its makers. Whatever's there on the screen for people to react to and interpret is fair game. Who can say what everyone's intentions were? (The more instinctual filmmakers, like maybe David Lynch or Terrence Malick, might admit they aren't sure themselves; they do what feels right to them without overanalyzing it before they do it.)

Speaking of that: Your story, David, reminds me of the response to Cronenberg's "The Fly" in 1986. Most of the people I knew who died of AIDS did so in the mid- to late-80s. It was so much on people's minds that many saw "The Fly" as a metaphor for AIDS. Cronenberg later said he didn't think of it that way (he'd just been thinking of an accelerated version of natural aging, the invariable "betrayal" of the body that everyone goes through as they age, not an immunodeficiency virus). But, he acknowledged, the metaphor works.

Don R. Lewis: I can't speak for Ridley Scott, but the sexual metaphors are so organic in "Alien" (in the story, the design, the effects, the way it's shot) that if Scott wasn't aware of them consciously, he was sure working with them subconsciously. (Remember, too, that in 1979, we didn't KNOW that the aliens impregnated humans and used them as cocoons -- that was in the script, but not in the released version of the movie.) Years after "Alien," Dan O'Bannon said: "One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number." So, what "Alien" does with that is open to interpretation... but there you are.

Tom: re "beginning of fanboy profundity": Thank you for this: "If that crap could've been toned down in the '80s and '90s, maybe we wouldn't be mistaking The Dark Knight for the return of Wittgenstein today."

And Jaime: Those "first three" are the ones, all right. I've always felt that "Blade Runner" was less than meets the eye (as some auteurist critic once said...), but it improved quite a bit when they jettisoned that horrible narration that Harrison Ford said he delivered under duress. For me, everything since has been a letdown, as you say. Sometimes you can just feel the movies falling apart before your eyes -- just when they should be coalescing and gathering momentum...