jettison (v.)

I used to be a bigger Star Wars fan than I am. May the day come when I can find grace in the sight of the Force and be born again.

For a long time, I billed myself as a contrarian to the contrarians, making a point of, for example, sticking up for the prequel films (episodes I, II and III) and even writing whole apologia for their canonical symmetry, harmonizing their apparent foibles with the meaning of the saga as a whole. (I called Star Wars a gesamtkunstwerk. Yes, I am ashamed.)

Looking back, it’s clear to me these attempts were often applications of the kind of exegesis I’d learned growing up in the fundamentalist evangelical church, the sort we applied to the Bible’s multiplicitous corpus to make it all make sense to itself (“scripture must interpret scripture”) and mesh with our particularly tortured, self-serving, apocalyptic interpretations.

Though to be fair, I wasn’t exactly out of bounds. There’s more than a little affinity between the Christian treatment of its Biblical canon and the way corporations and fandoms treat their cherished IPs.

I’ve written before about the pitfalls of canon culture, especially as it pertains to the meticulous, rigid, often cynical brand management typical of the big media corporations that give us some of our most beloved franchises. But it’s one thing to be critical; it’s another to propose an alternative vision.

And then, home alone for a couple weeks recently, I found myself sitting down to binge Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997) and Prometheus (2012)—the sequels (plus a prequel) to a true classic of sci-fi horror.

I came into the binge expecting a downhill trajectory: each successive sequel/prequel would steadily grind up and regurgitate everything that made the original Alien (1979) a gem until it became an acidic, mind-melting goop. I think I was wrong.¹

Each Alien sequel has a wildly different interpretation of the aesthetic and narrative significance of Ripley, the xenomorph, The Weland-Yutani Corporation, and their crooked acid dance around the sci-fi horror maypole. These interpretations play at reframing the visual and metaphorical terrain upon which that dance takes place while understanding the core narrative elements that make an Alien film: space capitalism puts workers² in contact with the coolest-looking,³ most dangerous life form ever conceived(/engineered?) through greed and negligence, forcing said workers to fight, struggle, and come together in solidarity, even if it means not everyone will survive.⁴

Part of the appeal, for me, is how playfully the sequels discard and reshuffle the facts established by the film(s) before. Alien 3 kills off—in the opening seconds of the movie, no less—the characters Ripley fought so hard to save in the climax of the movie that came, chronologically, like, right before it. Why does this narrative jettison fill me with glee and intrigue, whereas I cringe when, say, The Rise of Skywalker (2019) jettisons its own prequel’s “even nobodies can be heroes” arc with a reassertion of inherited chosenness? I wonder if part of what makes the difference is that Star Wars is such a carefully managed brand. Setting aside any debate over when it might have happened, third-generation Star Wars is all but meaningless apart from its canonicity, no longer simply a film series with a lot of fan fiction in its orbit but a total hierarchic domain, a Cinematic Universe. Every new piece has to connect to and mesh with every other piece of that canon, which means that stories cannot really stray from nominal lest they risk the integrity of the brand’s tightly controlled consumption apparatus, as well as introduce unresolvable anomalies into the database. Indeed, at the time it felt like The Last Jedi (2017) was“punished” both by many fans and by the next film in the saga, which slapped it on the wrist: no, Star Wars is not a place where nobodies can spontaneously rise into Jedi heroes; you’ve got to have the right bloodline, you absolute fool.

Watching the Alien movies is like listening to a chain story in which one person starts the tale, then another picks it up, then another, each adding their own weird ideas into the heady brew. It’s a horizontal, heterogeneous sequence rather than a vertical, normative canon.

The Alien movies are also a franchise, sure. We’re not talking about indie film here by any means. But the franchise clearly wasn’t handled with the strict, rigid management of the cinematic multiverses of our moment. One example: consider how many years (no less than five) come between each successive Alien sequel compared with the rigorous release schedules of modern franchises—a reminder that the failures of corporate canon culture are as much about labor relations as they are about narratology.

Canon is a huge, monstrous thing lurking in the dark, laying egg after egg, most unhatched, each carrying a parasitic squid ready to latch itself onto the unwary, take what it can, and discard the rest. We’ve gotta nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Short of that, there’s always the airlock.

1  Possibly with the exception of Alien: Resurrection, which left something of a bad taste in my mouth, but that was probably more due to Joss Whedon’s having written the movie than anything else.

2  Both paid labor and unpaid, as in the case of Alien 3.

3  With the exception of the pasty, misshapen, deeply noncommittal thing they revealed in Alien: Resurrection. What the hell were they thinking.

4  Honestly, this probably reveals Alien: Resurrection’s greatest flaw: Whedon apparently did not understand that Alien is at bottom a story about labor struggle.