Aside from Resurrection and those insipid Alien v. Predator flicks, the prequels to Alien find themselves on the margin, critically and according to fandom. This is sad, for a number of reasons, but not beyond understanding: why does the crew of the Prometheus travel in a shiny future spacecraft while the crew of the Nostromo putters through deep space in a tin can full of exposed PVC pipes (not close enough in style, btw, to buy Scott’s own explanation, that the Prometheus was a luxury vessel, and if you want to know why then watch the scenes where Dallas and Ripley chat with Mother….)? The films drag, or leave holes in the plot, and there should have been another film to link Covenant with the original. I actually think that the reason why these films, and Resurrection, are held at an arm’s length is because the xenomorphs (neomorphs, whatever) are soft, fleshy…. squishy. When I sit down to watch an Alien film, I want chitinous, HR Geiger-inspired bugs with needle-shaped teeth, not these freshly-peeled escapees from a shrimp cocktail platter or the gelatinous blob that absorbs Ripley in Rez.

I say that this marginalization is unfortunate — flaws notwithstanding –because the films contribute some of the most interesting depictions of the commodification and engineering of life of any SF film in recent memory. These ideas contrast with and complement the original premise of the first three films, encapsulated in the infamous Special Order 937 — “Priority one
Insure return of organism for analysis.
All other considerations secondary.
Crew expendable.“

At the start of Prometheus, though, we don’t even have a xenomorph. There isn’t even a proper iteration of the “perfect organism” by the time David embarks as the insane captain of a ship full of sleeping colonists, with just a few xenomorph embryos to continue his depraved experiments. But David is incredibly interesting as a manifestation of our own latent fears about biotech, especially as it becomes ever-more clear that not only are we, as regular people, driving the bus when it comes to these technologies that routinely violate borders, protocols, quarantines, and common sense. It may be that, at a certain point, no one is driving the bus at all.

In these films, the “no one” at the wheel gets a name: David, a synthetic person created by the quixotic Andrew Weyland as a surrogate heir and companion to aid him in his journey to 1) find the Engineers, who created humans in their likeness and 2) ask them nicely, in their own language, to please make him immortal. Prometheus finds David doing just what one might expect a really fast computer to do while everyone else is asleep for several years: play basketball, watch Lawrence of Arabia on repeat, spy on the sleeping crew members’ dreams, and delve into historical linguistics to reconstruct a Proto-Proto-Indoeuropean that simply must be (and it is) the language of the Engineers. When he discovers the rough draft of the xenomorph sitting in some oily concrete amphorae, he doesn’t hesitate to start experimenting on the crew right away, rekindling the Engineers’ program to develop an organism so aggressive that it can violate the laws of thermodynamics – it grows to its full size after like, two meals. This leads to one of my all-time favorite SF climaxes: Weyland and David wake a hibernating Engineer, David starts to make small-talk, and without a pause the Engineer rips off David’s head and beats Weyland to death with it. It’s a perfect depiction of what any of use would do if we woke up to a couple of rats squealing at us from our bedside table; smash now, ask questions later. So much for David’s philology skills…

The next film finds David oscillating between a castaway and a mad scientist on the Engineers’ home planet. He has killed his beloved Shaw and destroyed all animal life on the planet after releasing the xenomorph chemical/spores/stuff onto the populace, turning the world into a massive petri dish. He plays a long game with this crew, trying to earn their trust, particularly Walter, their own emotionally hobbled synthetic person, who is also played by Michael Fassbinder. Bad guy wins, really scary ending, and a pretty cool series of action sequences leading up to it.

I’m not typically in the habit of simply labeling the concerns of popular culture artifacts for a few reasons. First, what’s the fun in decoding a text just to re-encode it in a different register? Second, how does one reconcile the tension between sociohistorical and political concerns at the time of the production and that of the time of the consumption of a given text? What may have been produced in the shadow of the atom bomb might today evoke anxieties of global contagion or desertification, and I think that both of these readings are sanctioned because it isn’t what we fear but how we talk about it that matters to me. I say all of this because I actually do want to discuss what is being talked about here, mainly because the how and what are entangled pretty uniquely in the character of David.

David is a synthetic person. He was created by an insane trillionaire for a moon-shot voyage to find our makers. In the process, he became the creator of his own organism, the xenomorph. It is subtle, but David isn’t necessarily evil, at least in terms of his intentions. After all, he is a synthetic being and therefore not beholden to morality, ethics, etc. in the same way that authentic humans are thought to be, and his being is based on a much longer timescale and a mind that is based (presumably) on algorithms more than affects. He does, indeed, seem to regret that experimenting on Shaw was necessary to realize his role as creator, to inherit what Weyland promised him in his act of creation, so to speak. What I mean is, he is doing these evil things not for the pleasure of causing pain, nor is he working for some “greater good” that would justify these sacrifices. He simply intellectualizes them as “sacrifices” devoid of meaning. There are no costs, simply steps on a path of R&D.

This is because David works in the context of zoe, the tendency for life to continuously self-propagate. For him, in his timescale and ontological condition, life is eternal and hardly differentiated. The xenomorph promises nothing less than the “perfect organism,” but also nothing more. It is unimportant what it is “perfect” for in the same way that it is unimportant why one would try and improve their painting technique or ability to play the piano. Andreas Malm makes the interesting claim that, according to the later Marx, productive forces do not determine the relations of production in society. In other words, it wasn’t the steam engine that created Talyorism or moved peasants from the countryside or began the long descent into degradation and ecological disaster, not by itself. Rather, the relations of production are found within the productive forces. Neither precedes the other, but this recursive relationship is constitutive of industrial and social “progress,” and this is what makes David such a compelling figure. He is a manifestation of this recursive assemblage himself, occupying and responding only to what Marx has called (thanks, Søren Mau!) the mute compulsion of Capital to grow, compete, consolidate, and remove obstacles.

Years after the end of Covenant, Ripley will find herself at the wrong end of this mute compulsion over and over again as Special Order 937 tries to remove what Marx knew was the weak link in automated (or biotechnological) labor: the laborer.