When I was a teenager, I used to frequent an overpass near my house. It was over a busy motorway, and it was not uncommon to see white tents underneath me. These white tents, clinical tachrichim, meant only one thing – that somebody had been hit and killed.
I don’t think it’s possible for any living person to fully understand death, but many artists have used their mediums to try to, and amongst those artists are Gene Roddenberry, Dan O’Bannon, and Ronald Shushett. Star Trek and Alien stand as two beacons in the sea of portrayals of death – one set in a society where class has supposedly been abolished, the other in a society where the poor go off on years-long missions just to make enough to survive. What does it mean to die? And what does the death of the working man mean for the rest of us?
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When the original Star Trek was put on air in 1966, the archetypical expendable background characters died en masse. Over the course of the show’s three seasons, fifty-five characters died in the line of duty. A little under half of these dead crewmen worked in the engineering, security, and operations departments, hence perhaps the most recognisable moniker for sci-fi cannon fodder; redshirts, in reference to their lurid uniforms.
Death in the original series is approached with a distinctly utilitarian attitude, brushed off as collateral damage in the unending quest to keep the Enterprise on her course, and never mentioned again. Tears are not shed at the deaths of crewmen who die during their service – in fact, there are only two cases of ‘redshirts’ ever being referenced after their death in the entirety of the original Star Trek. To reference a particularly popular ethical conundrum, the many minor characters living and working aboard the Enterprise may as well be lined up on a tramway track, with a runaway trolley having just been diverted by some divine bystander away from the opposite side of the fork, and away from Captain Kirk.
Perhaps my personal favourite (if that’s a word you can use to tastefully describe death) redshirt death in the original series is in ‘The Devil in the Dark’. The Enterprise, responding to a distress call, visits a mining colony, where an unknown creature is wreaking havoc on equipment and killing the miners. This creature is later revealed to be a Horta, a territorial, acid-secreting, non-humanoid being notable for being the first known silicone-based lifeform, unlike the carbon-based lifeforms that populate Earth (and, in this particular case, the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.) After Kirk and Spock discuss the possibility of killing the creature (a disconcertingly frequent line of thought in the show, considering they are allegedly on a peaceful mission,) Spock performs a mind meld with the Horta, enwisening Spock to the kind nature of the lifeform, its concerns about the environmental impact of the mining operation on its home and its offspring, and, crucially, its openness to negotiation. Kirk suggests a collaboration between the miners and the Horta, wherein the Horta’s acidic discharge could be used to tunnel through rock in search of mineral deposits. Spock communicates this suggestion to the Horta, who agrees to participate, and the Enterprise once again boldly goes where no man has gone before.
One man is not fortunate enough to rejoin the Enterprise on her continued mission; when the idea of killing the Horta is debated by Spock and Kirk, Kirk summons a security team into the caves should this very outcome be required, and the Horta kills one of the guards. This guard isn’t named, he isn’t given any sort of funeral or burial, he’s not mourned, and nobody mentions him ever again; he just dies.
A cognisance of the greater political significance of this choice, of the guard never being acknowledged or mourned, of a general ambivalence towards the lives of redshirts, can be built up through the examination of what Siamak Mohavedi describes in his work The Utopian Pursuit of Death as the abstract mode of final wills and testaments written by Middle Eastern militants before their deaths. Mohavedi, examining 106 of these notes, categorised them by their mode of relatedness to the world; some were disengaged, formal notes containing instructions on the posthumous settling of affairs without any emotional or ideological expression, more were intimate, addressing loved ones with a sense of nostalgia for what once was and an isolation in the face of the coming battle, but the overwhelming majority (nearly 70%) are abstract, made up of reflections on philosophy, ideology, and morality. The purpose of this genre of note is not to communicate to any one specific figure or group, to communicate last wishes, or even to bid farewell to the world, but rather to serve as one final connection between the writer’s death and their ideology, and to concretise this ideology by laying a foundation upon their own corpse. Mohavedi puts it best; “How could one argue with a view secured by blood?”
The writer becomes immortal, permanently alive on a higher plane of existence, the plane that is ideology itself; the redshirt lives forever as a martyr, a human shield in front of the Federation, and a solid, bloody brick in its ever-fortified walls.
The lack of emotional response to crew members’ deaths on the Enterprise is symptomatic of the Federation’s bigger set of values. In his 1992 work Class Differences in Emotionality: Implications of Cognitive Theories, sociologist S.F. Cohn notes, under the larger umbrella of class-related differences in emotional self-labelling and regulation, that working-class individuals are more likely to repress their emotions than their upper-class counterparts. Middle and upper-class people tend to, according to Cohn, have more varied emotional vocabularies and thus have a broader lens through which to view their own emotions. For all its talk of abolishing poverty, the Federation has created a stratified society in which the non-bridge workers express nothing and the bridge workers are free to feel the spectrum of emotions, such as love and grief (see; Kirk in ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’.)
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A decade after the Enterprise’s helmsmen plotted a new course to exit the television system, cinema screens were graced by a crew aboard a different ship, the Nostromo. Ridley Scott’s Alien, alongside its truly horrific content about having to eat lunch with your coworkers, is full of death. Nearly 86% of the (human) crew of the Nostromo are killed by the titular alien. The death count grows if you count the Xenomorph getting sucked out into space (or perhaps that’s cancelled out, considering it was born on the ship – if you have a particular case to argue on that front, I’d love to hear it.)
Even those who have never seen Alien are likely to be familiar with the Chestburster scene; one of the most iconic moments in horror, and probably in the entirety of cinema, the ship’s Executive Officer Kane is eating alongside the rest of crew, celebrating his recovery from an encounter with the parasitic Facehugger, complaining about the food, when he begins to gag, to cough, and eventually, falls back onto the table, writhing in complete, basal agony, until the infant Xenomorph forces its way out through his chest. The June 1978 version of the movie’s script describes Kane screaming throughout the ordeal, culminating in a single plea to God before the final excruciating, bloody burst leaves his body hollow. According to Sigourney Weaver, who played Ripley, the version of the script given to the actors did not expand on the scene any further than a single, barebones direction indicating that the alien “emerges”.
Director Ridley Scott felt that terror could not be performed in a way that does the real thing justice, and so the reactions to the Chestburster are real, the actual first reactions of a cast who had no idea that they were about to be sprayed with offal Scott had bought earlier from a local butchershop. Among the more stand-out of these reactions is that of Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, crying quietly, looking over the gorey remains of what was once her coworker.
Lambert is the most emotional of the crew. When the Facehugger first attaches itself to Kane, she is the only person who tries to talk to him through it, and when Kane wakes up after it detaches itself from him, she is the first person to ask him how he’s doing. She cries at Kane’s death, with a cut version of the chestburster scene even having her fall over as she weeps. When Brett is attacked, she clings on to the hope that he might still be alive, despite other crewmates witnessing him being dragged away by the Xenomorph. Other characters care for each other, Ripley wants to warn the away team when she realises the transmission they are investigating could be a warning, she insists on bringing Jones back with her in the escape shuttle, Dallas refuses to leave Kane behind on the alien planet, but Lambert genuinely expresses grief.
By ‘grief’, I am referring to the distress caused by a profound loss, and in the insular termite-mound of the Nostromo, with its complicated, symbiotic web of coworker relationships, the death of Kane is the first crumbled brick in the foundation, one that, ultimately, rests a heavier load upon the backs of the remaining crew. S.F. Cohn notes that not only do cultural factors influence an individual’s perception of the world, but their emotional responses to occurrences and their choice of labels for these emotions are indicative of of this perception; Cohn’s overriding argument throughout the paper is that class should be taken into consideration as a factor in the emergence of the aforementioned emotional responses, not just for the individual as an intersectional being for whom class is the result of other, overlapping identities, but for the class as a whole. Lambert is a worker, if we are to acknowledge the well-acknowledged fact that parental income influences one’s future prospects it is likely she came from a working-class family, and when she grieves she grieves in the knowledge that Kane’s death is, perhaps, to be felt hardest in the workload he leaves behind, and in the fact that, despite the trauma of watching him die, there is no escape from the endless need to be paid in exchange for work.
The Nostromo brings to mind Bentham’s panopticon, with the ship as a cell and Ash (and, by extension, the company that he acts in the interests of) in that central column. The panopticon, of course, was used by Foucault as a metaphor for surveillance and its role in society. Aboard the Nostromo, Ripley insists that the ground team follow proper quarantine measures when Kane is attacked by the facehugger; she acts as she is supposed to, and that is the end goal of surveillance. In a surveilling society, one must act as if they are always being surveilled, and Ripley demonstrates this with her commitment to the rules over her commitment to Kane. Foucault states that power must be both visible and unverifiable, and, aboard the Nostromo, it is both – visible in the form of the logos on their uniforms and the presence of other employees, and yet unverifiable insofar as the employees do not know which of the others they can trust. This is compounded even further when the alien itself makes its way onto the ship – the alien holds power in the sense that it could be anywhere, within anyone. Class encroaches further into the equation in the form of the disciplinary power exercised by Ash over the crew; disciplinary power being the use of surveillance to keep the individual workers disciplined and productive. Foucault envisioned power as reciprocal, and it is so in Alien, with the presence of both Ash and the rest of the crew contributing to power relations.
Another point to be considered when discussing class in Alien is mechanisation. We see the replacement of living, working-class employees with machines, over in the case of Mother and covert in the case of Ash. Even if the entire crew had survived the events of the movie, they would still be expendable in the sense that the company can and has begun to replace them with machines. Mother plays the role of the professional-managerial class in the stratified society of Alien, and is what comes around when the rich are able to use technology to avoid sullying their hands with the matters of the poor. In the age of AI and technological unemployment, this theme is particularly poignant. I am reminded of the protests of the Luddites, whose uprising was inspired by the introduction of mechanical looms. Once again, we can turn back to the works of Foucault, and examine his concept of biopower – the proletariat’s biological limitations can be overcome by moving past the need for the proletariat at all.
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Between Alien and the original Star Trek is a shared setting, and a shared common demographic; both are set aboard spaceships, and the core characters across the two are all workers aboard said spaceships. The difference between the two, and subsequently the possible answer to their differing approaches to death and emotion, lies in their position on the utopia/dystopia continuum – Star Trek (at least, the original series) is the final result of centuries of striving towards the eradication of class, with the Federation existing as a post-scarcity, moneyless utopia, whereas in Alien capitalism continues to reign, and the exploitation of workers has expanded its reach from the confines of Earth outwards into the cosmos. Alien and Star Trek stand on opposite sides of the river that was the Golden Age of Capitalism, a period of economic expansion spanning from the end of World War Two in the mid-forties to the early seventies. Roddenberry was writing with an optimism not uncharacteristic of the era in which he was working, a hopeful belief that bigotry is underlined by a struggle for resources, and when abundance is achieved the need to step on others for what is ours dissipates, but Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett look onwards from the vantage point of having seen post-war prosperity come to an end, all while the American corporatocracy continues to thrive.