The other day I was listening, distractedly, to The Futurists podcast. Brett King and guest host Kevin J Anderson were interviewing Jeffrey Morris in an episode called, Filming the Future. Someone on the podcast said something about how the way aliens and monsters were imagined in 1960s movies was a product of the technology that existed to produce them as costumes or puppets or whatever. Now, with that physical limitation removed via CGI, AI, or insert-your-software-acronym-of-choice the possibilities are endless, and that it’s the same with the environment the aliens or monsters exist in.
But I have doubts about infinite options. I think humans always build cages, or at minimum, impose limits.
For something to be a commercial success you tend to have to trigger emotional arousal, whether by violence, fear, sex, or ambition. People like to see how they can triumph. Even the catharsis of tragedy can be a triumph (in the sense of achieving satisfaction).
So I don’t think just any type of alien or monster will appear. I think they’ll have to embody a key driver of our time (like fear linked to the necessity of responding to climate change) and be emotionally arousing with the temptation of triumph.
Think of Godzilla rampaging after the atomic bombs were dropped.
And once the movie studios see which monsters audiences respond to we’ll get more of the same.
As Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote, and I’m quoting from memory so forgive me if I get it a little wrong. “People don’t want news. They want olds.”
CGI might offer endless possibilities, but we prefer the familiar.
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I sometimes think how frustrated a newspaper or magazine editor would be if I submitted articles as short and incomplete as these posts. But I like sharing my ideas before I reach any conclusions. I like that I still have room to change my mind, add or subtract from my answers, and wander away down byways.
Comments
8 responses to “Alien Possibilities”
As Kurt Vonnegut said: “Argue for your limitations, and, sure enough, they’re yours.”
I had not heard that quote, and it’s damning. Yeah, it’s easy to become owned by what you accept.
I like that you share your thoughts. They spark mine too as I await the release of Rogues 🙂
Rogues is awesome! (she said with ultimate bias) I cannot wait to share it!
I’m glad you share your thoughts because I enjoy thinking about them too.
I can think of lots of non-humanoid aliens in books (a couple of examples: Ann Aguirre’s Sirantha Jax series, Tanya Huff’s Confederation series), but far fewer in TV and film. That makes sense to me, because books allow the readers to noodle visuals – probably mostly unconsciously – to play in their head in a way that makes sense to them. That’s obviously not the case in TV/film. Of the non-humanoid aliens I can think of in TV/film, they seem to all be cases where they are here to conquer – they are a big scary OTHER that we can’t interact with, they’re here to kill us. A good example is the Quiet Place, Nope, and War of the Worlds aliens. I wonder if that’s because having them be so other ups the scare factor (probably), or because human bias has a hard time allowing for non-humanoid aliens being friendly and here to interact with us, rather than harm us (depressingly probable as well, so I guess the answer is probably both). After all, even on Earth, the sad majority of humans see non-humanoid species as lesser beings. Either things to be steamrolled under the machine of human progress, or things to be conquered (we’ve done a pretty stellar job of wiping out most of the apex predators on the planet, though we’re now trying to fix that a bit). It makes sense we’d see aliens in a similar way, I suppose.
But that makes me think that stories are even more important, because we need to build our empathy muscles enough, as humans, that we stop devaluing non-humanoids. Both for our own sake – we can’t keep shattering ecosystems by smashing the food chain – and for the sake of interactions with interstellar neighbors that may come to visit. Imagine some big kaiju-looking alien coming for a friendly visit right now … humanity would freak out and try to kill it with fire before we even had one conversation.
I can absolutely see a band of idiots killing an alien and posting it on social media. Probably to the applause of Grok. Sigh. I’ve been reading the Elon Musk related Grokkisms lately (not on purpose! they appeared in my Bluesky feed) and honestly, this year is just filled with horrors, from the mundane but ominous like Grok to … well, take your pick!
A lot of people need to exercise their empathy muscles! (and I need more coffee – sorry for the early morning rant)
Yeah… *sigh* I’ve gone on a media diet, because it was giving me anxiety and insomnia. So don’t worry about the morning rant with me, I feel just the same. But caffeinate, because life is too short to go without coffee.
“life is too short to go without coffee” – this should be on a t-shirt! #lifetruth 😉