The Talkies /Alien and Winter Kills
Yagoda, Ben
ALIEN AND WINTER KILLS Alien does to animals what Invasion of the Body Snatchers did to plants. The title character, which manages to elbow its way aboard the spaceship Nostromo on its return to...
...With a few minor changes, in fact, the crew might be at a loft party in Sollo: They wear painter's pants, leather flight jackets...
...Old Kurt Vonnegut came trudging wearily by, but the kids didn't seem to recognize him...
...Nader looked up briefly at the assembly of youths he was about to address, no doubt reassuring himself at a glance that they were his type of people-the non-productive sector (called consumers...
...It's confirmed when the contradictory sources Nick encounters--who sport improbable names like Irving Mentor, Ray Doty, Frank Mayo, Caspar Junior, Ella May Irvin, Lola Camonte, and Harry Small-do things like try to run him over with a tank...
...Winter Kills makes the difficulty of obtaining information into a cosmology: It posits a world where receptionists, headwaiters, and security guards are in charge, and are determined not to satisfy the inquisitive...
...It's no small change from the post-Sputnik sci-fi of the late fifties and sixties, where the men in white suits held test tubes up to the light and were unimpeachable...
...The bearded Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), for example, mostly wants to get home...
...indeed, the alien's modus operands which involves hatching in a human's body and then emerging in a blaze of Wood, seems designed as much to gross earthlings out as to kill them...
...What's more, the effects are rather more disgusting than is necessary...
...It is not the Con-radian tale of conscience, betrayal, and isolation that we might expect, by Ben Yagoda given the ship's name and the fact that Scott's only previous effort was an adaptation of * The Duellists...
...even when punctured, it bleeds acid that burns through anything made by human hands...
...He looked down at some notes while aides de camp and admirers circled about...
...It is a paradise for inquisitors'and informers, but a living hell for those who value privacy, independence, and personal freedom...
...But despite the resources of his monomaniacal billionaire...
...there is no chance for escape from constant surveillance...
...Meanwhile, though, the alien is eating the crew members, individually and in pairs...
...He is aggrieved and he wants everyone else to feel aggrieved...
...This is by far the best critique of Nader'i assault on the voluntary sector of society that I have seen-brief, written in English and not sociology, carefully researched, and I think devastating in what it says about Nader's goals...
...Condon and director/screenwriter William Richert appear to be suggesting that all of the theories about the Kennedy assassination constitute, in their very crackpottedness, a smokescreen...
...Instead, he offers the offhand, funny suggestion that although the strangest things will happen in the future, people will behave much as they do in the late seventies...
...Alien, which features commendable performances from Harry Dean Stan ton and Yaphet Kotto, as well as from Hurt and Skerritt, effectively employs the technique of inscrutability...
...In every moment of silence we know (or are supposed to think we know) that a tentacle will reach out from stage left and do the dirty deed...
...The title character, which manages to elbow its way aboard the spaceship Nostromo on its return to earth, is a protean being that emerges on an uncharted planet from what looks like an inverted monkey wrench and alternately resembles a clam, a crab, a gorilla, a dogfish, a giant grasshopper, and a frogman...
...We suspect Winter Kills isn't going to be your run-of-the-mill conspiracy film when a Kegan family aide,, referring to a newly found murder weapon, remarks, "The FBI probably built it," and then breaks into hyena-like laughter...
...Hessen points out at the end that Nader envisions people living in small self-sufficient communities similar to those described by Rousseau, in which there will be a "radical transformation of time-use," to use Nader's words...
...This soon wears -thin...
...Alien, which was directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Dan O'Bannon, distrusts science as much as it docs animals: Ash has let the critter aboard in the first place-to study it, he says-and has programmed '' Mother,'' Npstromo 's computer, not to let anyone else know what's going on...
...And then, yes, there he was, walking down the steps, Sears Roebuck suit three inches above his ankles, carrying a raincoat although there wasn't a cloud in the sky, his file folder in hand-the Citizen Policeman himself...
...Alien induces bestial paranoia: Every time the ship's pussycat makes an appearance, we cringe and expect the worst...
...Nader's stance was oddly crooked and dislocated...
...By no means are these the astronaut clones of 2001...
...What's worse, everyone he does get to talk to gives him a different story, and most of them suffer a violent death soon afterward...
...Just as well he didn't get elected to the U.S...
...Spock, only worse, calls it "a perfect organism, a survivor...
...I received little impression of her husband, except that he seems content to play second fiddle, which is no doubt the way Jane wants it...
...The Pickering Commission had found Willy Arnold the sole killer (unfortunately, he was shot by saloon-keeper Joe Diamond), but new evidence, of a second gunman and a conspiracy, has fallen into the lap of Kegan's half-brother, Nick (Jeff Bridges), who is determined to follow the trail...
...starts getting it, in a kind of camp And Then There Were None...
...Assuming this strategy of indirection is intentional (and not merely shoddy technique), it adds to the tension quite well...
...that's how the powerful keep their power...
...Science Officer Ash (John Hurt), who's like Mr...
...I fear that very few of those in the crowd who waved and cheered and stamped their approval as Nader spoke realize this...
...Based on a novel by that master of paranoia, Richard Condon, the film is a set of wild variations on a theme: the assassination, on February 22, I960, of the youthful President Timothy Kegan...
...One problem with Winter Kills is that, through the outlandishness of the red herrings, the film mocks political paranoia, even while indulging in it itself...
...These points and many others are discussed in an outstanding new book that has come my way, called In Defense of the Corporation, by Robert Hessen (available from the Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, $7.95) of the Hoover Institution...
...That is why Nader is always on the side of big government...
...I admire its purity...
...It occurred to me at that moment that Nader has no loftier goal in life than to encourage in his listeners a sense of grievance...
...As in Body Snatchers, this polymorphous species is given a dubious Darwinian endorsement...
...Seriate or they'd probably be divorced by now...
...Proximity and visibility mean that everyone can monitor everyone else's attitudes and actions...
...It's the burden he carries, the chip on his shoulder...
...implications for us...
...He gets it in the forehead around ten seconds later...
...Moreover, the fact that we become as thoroughly confused as Nick not only violates the formal fallacy (i.e., a story about boredom need not be boring), but undercuts any serious point the film might have made...
...The film loses some of its charm, however, when the crew, which originally numbers seven...
...What's to be done...
...But governments say to us: You must do this...
...Information is hard to come by on the Nostromo both for the crew- " Mother" is in the hands of the das- " tardly Ash-and for the viewer-dialogue is conducted among loud blips and rumbles, TV monitors fail at critical moments, and (again, unlike earlier space epics) no one con- "-veniehtly summarizes actions and CAPITOL IDEAS (continued from page 6) what he said but I remember being impressed...
...This feeling is supported later on when Kegan pere tells Nick, "Your brother got laid 1,072 times while in office," and is told by his dotty wife (Dorothy Malone), "You're just mad because Nick doesn't want to be President...
...Alien is a likeable movie, in large part because of Its depiction of life on board the Nostromo...
...Hawaiian palm-tree shirts, and sneakers, and eat what looks like granola and bean-sprout salad...
...As in Alien, the man behind the computer-the Kegan family's minister of information (eerily played by Anthony Perkins)-turns out to be the master villain...
...What is so alarming about the anti-corporate sentiment which it is Nader's life mission to nurture is that it is, at bottom, an assault on voluntarism and an appeal to coercion...
...But whatever the incarnation, it is repulsive, ornery, very hungry, and virtually indestructible...
...he slurs his consonants, seeks refuge in Mozart, and is trapped into discussing the danger only when the efficient second-in-command (Sigourney Weaver) shuts all the automatic doors on him...
...The real plot, it seems, was hatched in the upper reaches of American power...
...The conspiracy is there, all right, but the lurid tales of sexual intrigue and Mafia revenge told by Gameboy and the rest aren't it...
...I won't bore you with a description of Jane Fonda except to say that she has got a terrific figure for someone in her 40s and her outfit (which looked as though it had been just casually tossed on, but must really have taken hours) showed off her finer points to perfection...
...Nader really doesn't like corporations because they offer us so many choices: You can buy this or that or the other, or you can go across the street and choose among other possibilities...
...father (John Huston), it's hard for Nick to get anywhere: Among other impediments, a diminutive doorman threatens him with a baseball bat and his (somehow suspicious) French girlfriend never returns the calls he leaves on her telephone answering machine...
...In the power to frighten, after all, the fiercest animal is no match for being in the dark...
...Richert may be proud that after seeing Winter Kills no one will be able to keep a straight face at a conspiracy film...
...Barry Commoner, who to me looks like a medieval demon, put in his obligatory appearance and delivered his customary plea for socialism dressed up as incontrovertible economics...
...The real evil can conceal itself because it controls the information: as Nick is told, "they will pile falsehood until you won't care about the truth...
...Otherwise, having gone well past the point of absurdity, he has relegated his film to the category of cinematic curiosity...
...Given its way, it would eliminate so many frivolous options...
...The answer, it turns out, involves Ash, who knows more about the uninvited guest than he has let on...
...Hessen writes: The appeal of a small community is that it will be easier to enforce self renunciation and conformity...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
