Twisted. Mingled. Ugly. Big. Scary… The history of monsters is full of rich creations of man’s twisted intrigue. While some monsters have familiar faces, others have a million faces. In this article, we will encounter two versions of the same monster. The implications, however, are plentiful, politicized, and befitting the anatomy of the alien!
Before we take a closer look at a few monsters, let’s establish what they are commonly defined as. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an alien (noun) is:
a creature from a different planet
someone who lives in a country of which they are not a legal citizen
The Intangibles
Humans like to divide things into categories: Good or evil. Sentient or insentient. Corporeal or incorporeal… You get the picture. The less capable we are of defining something, the more likely we are to—in the truest sense of the word—call it alien. Nowhere does that ring truer than with The Intangibles: Abstruse in form and vague of motive, these aliens are more conceptual than physical. Take The Shimmer from Annihilation (2018) as an example. Inspired by The Colour Out of Space, The Shimmer crashes into a lighthouse on Earth and envelops the surrounding area in an iridescent, electromagnetic field. Everything within the field has its DNA altered or replicated and soon enough the nearby park is full of human-bear hybrids and people with slithering, snake-like guts. While we do get a glimpse of The Shimmer at the end of the movie—then taking the form of a gas-like mandelbulb with the same coloring as the zone—it often assimilates into many of the protagonists, mimicking not just their looks but some memories as well. We don’t know why it does this or even if it’s capable of a reason for it. After all, the very drive to expand through replication and assimilation is also what leads to its ultimate defeat when it learns of the human tendency to self-destruct, the two acts are antithetical to each other. While it’s easy to come to the conclusion that this surely must mean that The Shimmer has no real consciousness, it’s important to remember that humans also act with similar contradictions.
Confused? Good. It is this uncertainty, both of form and reason, that makes these aliens intangible. That’s also why most media involving these Intangibles never really focus on the biological specifics, but instead on what their involvement in the story means for the human characters. This approach is explained in a quote from Solaris (2002). When our protagonist asks why the movie’s alien—a gigantic ocean on a distant planet—keeps making him see his fridged wife, he gets the succinct response: “There are no answers, only choices.”
The Benevolent Benefactors
“We come in peace,” they say, but how often do the otherworldly visitors prove helpful? We’re used to stories of abductions and invasions, but what about the benevolent aliens? The aliens that bring gifts? And no, free colonoscopies don't count.
While rare, these Benevolent Benefactors do exist. The 2016 movie Arrival features such aliens in the form of the sapient Heptapods. They arrive in giant oval stones, their bodies consisting of finger-shaped tentacles on the bottom half and the profile of a Bene Gesserit bodybuilder on top (you know, the witches from Dune?). The Heptapods proceed to teach humanity their written language and, in so doing, also grant us the ability to see time as nonlinear, just like they do. This not only saves us from our present problems but is also a tool we’re meant to use to help them in the far future. So, not entirely altruistic, but still benevolent!
Here, we can see the Benevolent Benefactors as a god of sorts. Not a creationist god as in the Abrahamic religions, perhaps, but more of a boon-granting god that’s found in various pagan religions. The Heptapods are wiser, stronger, more developed beings from the sky that help humanity in our hour of need, and all we need to do is have faith in their goodness and learn their scripture. When the different nations then start to argue about the meaning of certain words in the Heptapods’ writing—something that almost provokes a nuclear war—it's easy to draw parallels between their written language and the holy scriptures of mankind.
In the following part of this series, we will hide in a cupboard or under a bed…otherwise, we might be slashed! Hold your breath and stay tuned!
Written by Stephen K. Pettersson.
Cover illustration by Jaro Mettinisson.