The Peculiar Shape of Things To Come
Why are we all dithering about with aliens that look humanoid instead of creating cool, wacky stuff that challenges us?
One thing I’d like to see more of in media is a willingness to take more risks with non-human characters. When it comes to alien, or mythical creatures, creatives can end up relying on creating humanoid, anthropomorphised characters, usually with some sort of alien gloss attached. We still haven’t moved on from the little green men of the 1950s, a depiction of aliens first suggested by two yokels from Kentucky (1).
Let’s take Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which as Marvel films go, was pretty tongue in cheek, and could probably get away with messing around a bit. And yet, in the entirety of space, our hero ends up consorting with two variants on ‘blue guy’: Drax the Destroyer and Yondu Udonta. Here they are:
Does this not strike you as a little bit boring? Okay, They’re adaptations from a series of comic books, and perhaps the creators wanted to stay true to the world of the comics. Fair enough.
But variants on ‘humanoid aliens that our human heroes gotta fight’ are everywhere.
This is the staid formula for many Dr Who villains, for Star Trek aliens, for Star Wars aliens. Any film or TV show that attracts a dude with square-rimmed glasses and overwhelming B.O. has probably fallen foul of this trope at some point.
Now, I’m going to spend a little while defending myself here, because lambasting the vast multitude of creatures in the fictional world is a massive generalisation, and thus probably requires some defending.
Anthropomorphs
One dominant part of this trope is the vampire/werewolf/zombie axis (VWZ), which have dominated countless movies. Of the Axis of (Fictional) Evil, all three are usually man-shaped or woman-shaped, maybe with a bit of face paint & some stick-on keloid scarring.
This could be why we see this trope so often - it’s easier to a) put a human in a costume and apply makeup than to painstakingly create a creature from a model via technical cutting, as they did with the face-hugger in alien, or to painstakingly create creatures via CGI, as is usually required for more complex creatures. It’s more expensive to do this. It’s more expensive to pay people to work harder, or to pay animators or VFX teams to create different creatures, than to put a guy in a suit with some makeup.
Depending on the complexity, models are usually expensive in terms of time, as opposed to just being pricey.
Plus, b) you get greater realism when actors can move like humans.
Then there’s c), that telling stories with familiar creatures is easier. Of the VWZ axis, all three have long historical roots. They have recognisable forms, strengths and weaknesses, and if they look alien, we know we need to fight them. Or negotiate with them, or fuck them, or whatever.
The point is that they can be introduced easily into a plot without the characters needing to spend the next fifteen minutes of screen-time screaming “what in the everliving shitpile are we up against???”. They often do this anyway, but that’s besides the point. More generally, anthropomorphic aliens move like humans, so even a dummy like me can follow it. Huh duh, one foot then next foot, alien smart.
There’s also d), where much of the time it is simpler to make your characters rudimentary, so that you can focus on the things you want to focus on. It would be self-defeating if in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a book explicitly exploring an alien society where gender is not a hard binary, Estraven had no fixed sex but was also a jellyfish.
Besides, I hear you exclaim, the creature is irrelevant! The storytellers behind such stories are interested only in what human traits those creatures force out of us.
No-one is saying that you can’t tell good stories with these characters. Those same creatives have also done brilliant things with the creatures I just listed as trite cliches two paragraphs ago, such as, for instance, the vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows, the horror comedy An American Werewolf in London, or the wildlife documentary World War Z.
And this is not to say that an anthropomorphic creatures have no value. The Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth is easily one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen, and I terrify easily. But even he was still a human-shaped plastic bag with a bowling ball head. Meanwhile, other humans, shrunk down, turned blue and given wings dance around Ofelia, and aid her escape.
It seems that when we create creatures, there’s a need for them to be comfortable, for them to make sense to us. The easiest way to make them make sense to us is to make them to look like us.
And all of that sounds fair enough. Good points, team.
Creating In Abstract
But when you’re sat in the writing cavern, or wherever it is that writers create things, surely there are an infinite number of possibilities of fabricated flora and fauna. And yet, we so often end up with things that look a whole lot like us, but run through a woozy Instagram filter.
And in a way, I get that. We’re pretty great. We dominated this planet, and developed a ton of technology that helps us to maintain that dominance. But as creatures, we seem fairly fragile. Besides raising our young for an eternity - I am yet to move out of my parent’s house - we seem, in my humble eyes, like fairly fragile and inflexible creatures. And yet, so many of the universe’s most terrifying villains seem to be shaped exactly like us.
Here’s Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time:
“People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.”
Is being human-shaped really so great? Being bipedal confers advantages, but if you ran the development of our world in a simulation a trillion times, would you really end up with a bipedal creature dominating every time? This is what many science fiction worlds end up containing. Us, multiplied a trillion times over the universe.
When I see a monster like Predator, a creature literally created to hunt, and he’s a bipedal guy with the workings of an Afro, I get the sense that we’re afraid to create creatures with mechanics that are radically different from the ones that we’re most familiar with.
Contra to my earlier point about the creature being irrelevant - yes, I set that up, devil that I am - I think often creatures that are radically different from us can sometimes tell us more about ourselves than creatures that look like us.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, creatures that perceive time differently from us, are much more comfortable with something that we all fear - death. They know that a man lives for so many different lengths of time because they can see them living those lengths of time, simultaneously.
They see the past, the present and the future, and they see them all at the same time. Vonnegut, who survived the firebombing of Dresden, couldn’t express that horror in a simple, human manner. He needed the Tralfamadorians to be able to even address the topic (2).
And yet those same Tralfamadorians were:
“two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm.”
In the same way we learn the most about ourselves from those most different to us, maybe we’d learn more about ourselves from movies if more aliens looked like a deformed plunger. Maybe.
The larger productions, the ones most able to experiment with alternative forms, are the ones most guilty of not experimenting. Guardians of the Galaxy, whose Blue Man group we mentioned above, also stars ‘green girl’, ‘blue girl’, ‘tree guy’, ‘guy with eyes that glow’ and ’little raccoon man’, to pad out the alien cast. I can’t help but wonder if at least some of these characters would be richer if they weren’t humanoid bipeds that have some vaguely alien cladding.
Unfortunately, Marvel can use their comic books as the ultimate cop out, because they can be uncreative and claim that they’re staying true to their lore. But is this really an excuse? People with larger budgets are able to do more things, and yet all of our high budget shows seem to contain very staid, boring humanoid aliens.
So, Genius, What’s Your Big Idea?
Creatures that look different, and that interact with us new and interesting ways, are not that hard to conceptualise.
Remember how I had a go at Doctor Who above? I think Doctor Who is simultaneously one of the worst for the ‘humanoid alien’ brand of monster (and this is probably a budgetary / time thing), and one of the best. I loved the episode in the Library, starring the Vashta Nerada, the piranhas of the air and darkness, who would move closer to people via their shadows. The episode ‘Midnight’, where a creature that lives in intense radiation stops and attacks a shuttle train, is something I regularly think of when commuting.
Clearly it’s possible to find a way around budget.
This is not a point purely about shape, either. What we see of the Babadook is loosely humanoid, but that’s because it’s part-monster, part-construction in Amelia’s mind. It’s taking on human shapes because those are the shapes of its surroundings.
The Weeping Angels are humanoid in a pedantic sense, but they operate on a brilliant mechanic - moving while you blink. In a similar vein, there’s a sci-fi novel called Blindsight, where aliens depend on saccades - briefly, we move our eyes in short, sharp bursts, called saccades, and the brain fills in what we don’t see - to stay out of our vision (3).
And lots of people have done this more abstract approach well (I just want to see more of it!). Shows like Rick and Morty do a great job of portraying bizarre creatures that function in abnormal ways, and make up the backing and fronting cast of their universe:
The SCP foundation, a sort of group project sci-fi universe, is a litany of such creatures. Obviously, it’s a group project, so the kid who doesn’t do any work just waited to the deadline and made the Pale Man - lite edition. But many of them are incredibly interesting, and threaten and challenge people in new and different ways, such as, say, a living tattoo that feeds off melanin in the skin, causes vitiligo, and is also an STD. It causes immense pain, and also explains a lot of things at the Neverland Ranch.
How about a computer program that plays music that replaces conscious thoughts as you think them, and substitutes in new ones? My personal favourite is the sentient piping, which will attempt to integrate into any existing pipe system, but contains no materials traditionally used to make pipes:
Pipes have been reported as being made of bone, wood, steel, pressed ash, human flesh, glass, and granite…
…Any personnel acting violently, carrying tools, or attempting to damage or repair [the pipes] in any way, will trigger a reaction. Any pipes near the subject will burst, spraying on the subject for several seconds before the flow suddenly stops.
Pipes have been reported containing oil, mercury, rats, a species of insect not yet identified, ground glass, sea water, entrails, and molten iron. Pipes will continue to burst around the subject until death or retreat.
The movie Arrival used two very unhuman aliens in order to convey the difficulties of language and communication. Here they are:
Jorge Luis Borges collected a number fantastical creatures into a compendium, entitled The Book of Imaginary Beings, which contains its fair share of humanoid creatures from legend, but also features many stranger alternatives.
The first entry in this book is a creature called the A Bao A Qu, which is probably based on Malayan myth. It lives in the Victory Tower at Chittor, and as a person climbs the tower, begins to take shape:
A winding staircase gives access to the circular terrace on top, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb the tower. On the stairway there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul known as A Bao A Qu. It sleeps until the approach of a traveler and some secret life within it begins to glow and its translucent body begins to stir.
As the traveler climbs the stairs, the being regains consciousness and follows at the traveler's heels, becoming more intense in bluish colour and coming closer to perfection. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, and only when the traveler is one who has already attained Nirvana, whose acts cast no shadows.
Otherwise, the being hesitates at the final step and suffers at its inability to achieve perfection. Its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. It tumbles to the first step as the traveler climbs down and collapses weary and shapeless, awaiting the approach of the next traveler.
In the course of the centuries, A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.
I’d love to see more creatures that dissect us, and our goals and ambitions. Creatures that don’t just confront us with star gun weapons like a two-bit alien mobster, but that make us actively think.
Please don’t think of me as some pretentious indie film critic who is desperate to see an end to ‘easy movies’, or whatever it is those guys want. Think of me as an incredibly sexy young man, with maybe some hair problems, who just wants to see more variety in his totally made-up universes. We live in a world where all the restrictions on creativity are becoming much cheaper, so let’s exploit that and make some weird stuff.
And I don’t think that active thinking I mentioned just now means that a movie or a show has to be difficult or challenging, or whatever categories Netflix use these days.
Abstract creatures, like sentient piping, can still present a simple challenge to be fought. But it’s a challenge that would require more creativity and adaptation to solve, which to me feels like the basis of better film & TV. Don’t we all love a good puzzle?
I love gunfights with two-bit alien mobster as much as the next guy. But don’t you think that there’s room for the abstract creature and the mobster to exist together in the entirety of the fucking universe?
If you disagreed with all of the above, drop me a note. I’m trying to do that Superforecasting thing where I’m not attached to any of my positions, and I revise my outlook in response to disagreement. But, as an aside, if you challenge me in any way I will personally come after you.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly%E2%80%93Hopkinsville_encounter
(2) I’m reminded of the writing of Agri Ismaïl, who approached trauma orthogonally, through photographs - it’s not related at all, but brilliant (https://tinyletter.com/Agri/letters/a-appendix-archive).
(3) More here:
And here: https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2019/saccades-lifes-blur-we-dont-see-it-way
Stuff I’ve liked recently (stealing this format from a friend):
1) Iko Iko - The Belle Stars - Yes, I got this from The Hangover, and it’s a cracker.
2) The Longest Johns (yes, they did the Wellerman) do a community singing project and it is cute as hell: Leave Her Johnny - The Longest Johns.
3) The Minimum Wage Machine, where you turn a crank to earn minimum wage over an hour. Pennies drop out slowly. This one’s depressing.
4) Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric - I got this one from Stranger Than Fiction, which was also great. I think you can play a game as you watch where you try to spot cultural / scientific / literary references, i.e. Hilbert has 23 story types, in an illusion to David Hilbert’s 23 Problems, there’s an allusion to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on a chalkboard. Bonus points for the “I brought you flours” gag, which I’d never heard before. Lovely.
5) This is beautiful from Bullion.