Prometheus Bound, Part 2: Body Horror & The Sublime

So yes, Prometheus is in many ways a huge disappointment. Yet I find it stays with me in potent ways, and not just through the cheap horror thrills. (I call them cheap because they are presented outside any coherent psychological frame; in a word, they are gratuitous. That doesn’t make them any less powerful, especially for someone as squeamish as I am). The disappointment stems, I think, from its really being two movies – the first, a compelling story about the extraterrestrial origins of life on earth and the radical dethroning of human exceptionalism; the second, also an origin story, but really just an excuse for a gory schlock-fest that awkwardly attempts to shoehorn into the first narrative a shallow justification for rebooting the Alien franchise. Basically an exercise in brand promotion, this second storyline makes it clear that the real hero of the film is the alien itself. As it rises from the corpse/incubator of the Engineer in the film’s ending, Scott can’t resist investing it with a Gotterdammerung-like pretentiousness. Hail the conquering beast! Or, as a friend waggishly put it: “I have a mouth inside a mouth inside another mouth…” The implication of this story arc carries an ersatz resonance – humans and the monster carry strands of the same DNA.

(I’ll just note here that my knowledge of the whole series is rather spotty. Scott’s inauguration of the franchise was a slickly crafted, if cynical, film – and yes, it scared the shit out of me when I saw it. The third installment was forgettable and of the fourth I profess total ignorance. The true gem in the series is the second, directed by Cameron. That said, Stephen Mulhall, a British philosopher who writes on Heidegger, has done an excellent job of thinking through the Alien Quartet and the questions it raises in his compact and excellent book, On Film).

Mixed into the murk of Prometheus – its insulting violations of verisimilitude, its shabby internal consistency and logic, its weak characterizations and dialogue (just a collection of attitudes, really), and its cynical exploitation of the audience – are some truly stunning moments of spectacle: images that linger on after the queasy creature fest has faded. Though the film overall is emotionally dissonant, the scenes of wonder that punctuate it go a considerable ways toward saving it from collapsing under the weight of its own morbidity.

But before I go into that angle, a few words about horror.

In her essay, “Reading Like an Alien” (in Posthuman Bodies), my old professor Kelly Hurley smartly dissects the first two films in terms of the rise of so-called “body horror” films in the 80s (a response to AIDS, among other cultural anxieties?). Body horror is all about revulsion – about the polymorphously perverse desecration of the human body and finally, as she writes, about an utter lack of investment in nostalgia for the human as “a discrete and stable category.” This is a kind of Lovecraftian gnostic horror, in which the scale of the universe is not only older and vaster than we can conceive, but more significantly, where the human is dwarfed by biomorphic monstrosities, hybrid organisms whose shapes alter with the environment and whose logic is either that of the hive, or something even further outside mammalian social structures. It’s as though human bodies were designed to be penetrated, suborned and consumed by alien life forms; and indeed, this horror seems like an extension of what we currently know about our own bodies – that they are not truly ours, in the sense of sole proprietorship, but are always already colonized by millions of bacteria. The real horror in body horror comes from the way the body is shredded, not of the body, but the very idea of identity itself.

All the same, Prometheus stages wonder in powerful ways. Despite its title, it’s really a film about the past. Its gorgeous opening sequence – gorgeous, but problematic, because it immediately represents creaton in terms of religious rituals of self-sacrfice, makes this an archaeological detective story, which is another way of saying, it’s a ghost story. And the ghosts do show up. First, in the marvelous hologrammic sequences where we see the Engineers fleeing from something unseen (of course it’s unseen). And then when the final Engineer implacably implausibly arises from his crypt after a 2000-year nap and bemusedly tears the head off David, the android (who is the liveliest character in the whole motley crew, stealing every scene he’s in) the way a child might twist off a doll’s head.

The centerpiece of wonder – which we know from Suvin, Clute, et al. is the trope of tropes in SF – occurs when David presses “Play,” as it were, in the Engineers’ cockpit and the whole space lights up with an orrery. But as with so much else, perhaps everything, really, in this film, the scene of writing is contaminated from the get-go.

Side-note: the hologram display in the cockpit of the Prometheus is pretty fancy, too, revealing the interior of the pyramid, and eventually, the buried starship. It's both prelude and lesser companion to the Engineers' orrery, a bit of foreshadowing or paralleism. But this raises another one of those annoying questions that drags down the film, the way its script is outpaced by its fx. These Engineers have been around for millions of years, right? And they're still using what, given the scale of time involved, seems like primitive technology. Visually awesome, for sure -- and therefore, necessary for a movie. But why are they still mucking around with their toys at this stage, their squids and bipeds and so forth? Seems like they would have engineered themselves to some new level Quite Beyond Us and left all that in the dust, rather the way elder races in Iain Banks' Culture novels grow weary of matter and go Sublime. Or maybe they're just bored.

For the orrery is not merely a chart that connects the now with the then, the life of humans on Earth with its moment of inception, an overview of Creation itself. It is also a blueprint for corporate management, the scene of wonder as filtered through the map of conquest. The orrery is a kind of speculum – a mirror in which we think we discern our true and original design; almost Wordsworthian, in a way. Except that poor William’s been upstaged or outflanked by HPL.

Wonder in this scene is signaled by several things: by scale and recognition; by circular camera movement; by the abstract becoming tangible (the glowing sphere of the earth hangs like a luminous fruit to be plucked, as it is), and by David the android’s complete rapture with the entire tableau. This kind of visual cueing is effective, but dishonest. As David responds so the audience responds – with a gaze of fixity and a slight smile. Whence this smile? This is perhaps the most sneakily uncanny moment in the whole film since David’s silky responses, we can presume, are in line with our own engineering of him, designed to make humans feel assured, even if the android itself is incapable of real emotion. And indeed, the script plays this angle up quite smartly with its “we made you because we could” line.

But that orrery – it’s not just a map. It’s a special effect that represents what Scott Bukatman calls "the artificial infinite," a vista that dethrones human exceptionalism. And while we marvel at it, because it induces a sense of awe mixed with vertigo (there's a center, yes, but the camera keeps spinning, keeping us off balance) it also gives us, or should, a deep interstellar shiver. As in, Stephen Hawking's gloomy pronouncements on nasty ETs, AKA the Fermi Paradox (elaborated on in Greg Bear's diptych, Forge of God and Anvil of Stars). Or maybe it comes down to Herzog's remark in Grizzly Man: nature is totally indifferent to us.