In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construction. That’s not to say it was a shoddy piece of work; quite the contrary, as explained in the new video above from CinemaTyler. Its creation demanded the dedicated efforts of an international group of professionals including special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who’d engineered the giant ape head in the 1976 King Kong remake and the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and would later work on an even more iconic extraterrestrial for E.T.).
Charged with designing the alien, and eventually with overseeing its fabrication and assembly, was the artist H. R. Giger, whose artistic sensibility occupied the intersection of organism and machine, Eros and Thanatos. Though it’s most thoroughly expressed in the deadly creature that stows away aboard the space tug Nostromo, it also, to one degree or another, pervades the whole movie’s look and feel.
Whether from the late seventies or any other period, the usual sleek, antiseptic sci-fi futures date rather quickly, a condition hardly suffered by the unrelievedly dark, dank, and dysfunctional setting of Alien. This surprisingly grimy realism makes the threat of the alien feel that much more real; hidden in its many shadows, Giger’s vision preys that much more effectively on our imagination.
Not that it was guaranteed to succeed in doing so. As CinemaTyler explains, the process of creating the alien came up against countless setbacks, all under increasingly severe constraints of both time and budget. At times the production got lucky, as when it happened upon the nearly seven-foot-tall Bolaji Badejo, who ended up wearing the alien costume (despite Scott’s insistence, early in the production, that he didn’t want to make a movie about “a man in a suit”). But it was attempting to create a being of a kind never seen on screen before, one that had to be developed through trial and error, more often the latter than the former. And it was hardly the only difficult aspect of the making of Alien, as evidenced by the eleven-and-counting episodes of CinemaTyler’s series on the subject. Maybe in space, no one can hear you scream, but one can easily imagine the cries of frustration let out by Scott, Giger, and all their pressured collaborators down here on Earth.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher.
Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley, who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th-century dystopian novel.
Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”
Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Listen to him read a dramatized version of the book here.)
Basically, while praising Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley argues that his version of the future was more likely to come to pass.
In Huxley’s seemingly dystopian World State, the elite amuse the masses into submission with a mind-numbing drug called Soma and an endless buffet of casual sex. Orwell’s Oceania, on the other hand, keeps the masses in check with fear thanks to an endless war and a hyper-competent surveillance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are diametrically opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Huxleyan one are simply two different modes of oppression.
While we haven’t quite arrived at either dystopian vision, the power of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Huxley might make you look askance at The Bachelor or Facebook, Orwell makes you recoil in horror at the government throwing around phrases like “enhanced interrogation” and “surgical drone strikes.”
You can read Huxley’s full letter below.
Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
When New York City hosted The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asimov, the prolific sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, took the opportunity to wonder what the world would look like 50 years hence — assuming the world survived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writing in The New York Times, Asimov imagined a world that you might partly recognize today, a world where:
“Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.”
“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.”
“[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.”
“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.”
“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes.”
“[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
“[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.”
“[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.”
“[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.” And later he warns that if the population growth continues unchecked, “All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect.” [See our Walt Disney Family Planning cartoon from earlier this week.]
“Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.”
“The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction.… All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran.”
“[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.”
“[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!” in our “a society of enforced leisure.”
Isaac Asimov wasn’t the only person during the 60s who peered into the future in a fairly prescient way. You can find a few more on-the-mark predictions from contemporaries below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the plot of her 22-minute film as follows: The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to question whether she might actually be a robot. Through a dark comedic lens, [the film] explores themes of identity, self-determination, love, and technology in a world where the line between humanity and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly blurred.” This past weekend, “I’m Not a Robot” won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short, marking the first time a Dutch short film received this honor. Distributed by The New Yorker, “I’m Not a Robot” can be viewed free online. We’re adding it to our collection of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile as a science communicator, it will hardly come as a surprise that he displays a certain sensitivity to cinematic departures from scientific fact. His personal low watermark on that rubric is the 1979 Disney production The Black Hole, which moves him to declare, “I don’t think they had a physicist in sight of any scene that was scripted, prepared, and filmed for this movie.”
As for Tyson’s “single favorite movie of all time,” that would be The Matrix, despite how the humans-as-batteries concept central to its plot violates the laws of thermodynamics. (Over time, that particular choice has been revealed as a typical example of meddling by studio executives, who thought audiences wouldn’t understand the original script’s concept of humans being used for decentralized computing.) The Matrix receives an S, Tyson’s highest grade, which beats out even the A he grants to Ridley Scott’s The Martian, from 2015, “the most scientifically accurate film I have ever witnessed” — except for the dust storm that strands its protagonist on Mars, whose low air density means we would feel even its highest winds as “a gentle breeze.”
You might expect Tyson to poke these sorts of holes in every sci-fi movie he sees, no matter how obviously schlocky. And indeed he does, though not without also showing a healthy respect for the fun of filmgoing. Even Michael Bay’s notoriously preposterous Armageddon, whose oil-drillers-defeat-an-asteroid conceit was mocked on set by star Ben Affleck, receives a gentleman’s C. While it “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Tyson explains (noting it’s since been outdone by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall), “I don’t care that it violated the law of physics, because it didn’t care.” For a more scientifically respectable alternative, consider Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, the lesser-known of 1998’s two Hollywood asteroid-disaster spectacles.
If you’re thinking of holding a Tyson-approved sci-fi film festival at home, you’ll also want to include The Quiet Earth, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Contact, and Gravity, not to mention the nineteen-fifties classics The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. But whatever else you screen, the experience would be incomplete without 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s joint vision of man in space. “Am I on LSD, or is the movie on LSD?” he asks. “One of us is on LSD for the last twenty minutes of the film.” But “what matters is how much influence this film had on everything — on everything — and how much attention they gave to detail.” If you’ve ever seen 2001 before, go into it with an open mind — and bear in it the fact that, as Tyson underscores, it was all made a year before we reached the moon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter earlier this decade. But before any of those came Dune, the jazz-funk album by keyboardist and bandleader David Matthews. Released in 1977 on the popular jazz label CTI Records, it devotes its entire first side to a 20-minute suite ostensibly inspired by Herbert’s novel, consisting of the pieces “Arrakis,” “Sandworms,” “Song of the Bene Gesserit,” and “Muad’dib.”
You’ll notice that the typography on the cover of Matthews’ Dune seems awfully reminiscent of Star Wars, a film that had come out the very same year. It’s not exactly false advertising, since the album closes with versions of both Star Wars’ main theme and Princess Leia’s theme, supplemented by the theme from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and even David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” According to jazz historian Doug Payne, the concept was the idea of CTI founder Creed Taylor.
Taylor had originally hired Matthews as CTI’s chief arranger, the latter’s years of experience as James Brown’s musical director having promised the potential to imbue the label’s releases with disco appeal. In addition to Matthews on the keyboards, Dune also features heavy-hitting session players from the late-seventies jazz world like Randy Brecker, Steve Gadd, Grover Washington, Jr., Hiram Bullock, and David Sanborn. Fans of obscurantist hip-hop may also recognize Matthews’ “Space Oddity” cover as a sample source for MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.”
Much like Bob James, his fellow mastermind of disco-inflected jazz, Matthews has created a body of work that lives on a hip-hop goldmine: his other samplers include Method Man, Redman, and The Notorious B.I.G. But it was in Japan that he found his most enthusiastic listenership. After leaving CTI in 1978, Payne writes, “Matthews went onto record a slew of records for mostly Japanese labels under a variety of guises including Japan’s number one selling jazz group, the Manhattan Jazz Quintet.” If you visit Japan, you may well hear Matthews’ music playing in a local jazz bar.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even according to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hardly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace described Dune as “unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the miscasting of the director himself: “Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history,” marshaled by super-producer Dino De Laurentiis. But could even a master blockbuster craftsman have made cinematic sense of Frank Herbert’s original story, “which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain”?
With its two parts having been released in the twenty-twenties, Villeneuve’s Dune practically cries out for Youtube video essays comparing it to Lynch’s version. The one above from Archer Green first highlights their differences through one scene that was memorable in the novel and both films: when, being put to the test by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the young hero Paul Atreides, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLachlan and the new one by Timothée Chalamet, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Superficially similar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defining qualities of each picture’s look and feel — Villeneuve’s is shadowy and full of ancient-looking details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futuristic Jacobean theater — as well as the contrast between how they dramatize the source material.
The new Dune is “a very modern-looking film that goes for a realistic and grounded aesthetic, and it feels more like a serious prestige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “whereas old Dune is more surrealist: it’s elaborate, grungy, and ultimately quite over the top.” Their having been made in different eras explains some of this, but so does their having been made at different scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Villeneuve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch openly admitted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hollywood project, but he also seldom failed to mention that the studio demanded that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 minutes in order to guarantee a certain minimum number of daily screenings.
This pressure to get the runtime down must have motivated some of what even in the nineteen-eighties felt old-fashioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extended “exposition dumps” and its “having characters’ thoughts audibilized on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking face,” as Wallace put it. The film’s failure “could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack, doing effects-intensive gorefests for commercial studios” or “sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure, plotless 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the paltry deal subsequently offered him by De Laurentiis and made Blue Velvet, whose success he rode to become a major cultural figure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fiasco gave Chalamet the eventual opportunity to become the definitive Paul Atreides — and MacLachlan, to become Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine was one of the most important science fiction digests in 1950s America. Ray Bradbury wrote for it–including an early version of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451–as did Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, and numerous others.
When Galaxy appeared in October 1950, it promised a kind of science fiction different from the space operas of previous decades. As an “annual report” written by publisher H.L. Gold proclaimed,
…other publishers thought the idea of offering mature science fiction in an attractive, adult format was downright funny. They knew what sold–shapely female endomorphs with bronze bras, embattled male mesomorphs clad in muscle, and frightful alien monsters in search of a human soul.
And while Astounding Science Fiction was focused on technology–suited for an America that had fundamentally changed since WWII–H.L. Gold’s Galaxy focused on ideas, humor, satire, psychology and sociology. It also had one of the best pay rates in the industry, and offered some of its writers exclusive contracts. And the writers responded in kind and followed their own obsessions–although Gold often pitched ideas.
(Ironically, though immersed in stories of inner and outer space, Gold was an acute agoraphobe, and stayed in his apartment, communicating by phone.)
After a wobbly start graphics-wise, Gold hired Ed Emshwiller in 1951 to paint covers, whose often humorous style (e.g. this Christmas issue below) suited the humor inside the issue.
Confident in their stable of writers, Galaxy produced the wonderful birthday cover at the top, featuring caricatures of everybody from Bradbury to Asimov. There’s also a guide to see who’s who.
A series of editors–including Frederik Pohl–took over from Gold after a car accident in 1961, and by 1977–eight years after Pohl’s departure–the magazine was on its decline. There were more iterations, reprints, anthologies, and online versions, but the essential run is here. And those first ten years changed American science fiction forever, paving the way for experimental writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.
You could start with the Ray Bradbury story (“The Fireman”) we told you about, or Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Puppet.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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