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Of all the movies in the Alien franchise, the third is the darkest of them all. It is literally dark, with much of the action taking place in dimly lit corridors, winding spaces, and mineshafts. It is also thematically bleak, set on the penal colony planet Fiorina “Fury” 161, to which the worst male criminals have been sent to be the workforce in an abandoned mining venture. This is where Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) encounters the possibility of rape, something she had not faced in her previous journeys. She is saved by Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), a spiritual leader of the inmates who is able to organise them as and when needed. His leadership proves vital when Ripley needs the prisoners to rally against the latest iteration of the xenomorph, one that she brought onto the planet when her ship’s escape pod crash landed there. She also discovers, to her dismay, that her own body harbours an embryonic version of the creature, one that could eventually rip out of her and escape to take over the universe.
Nearly all the prisoners speak in varied British accents (the film was shot in the UK), with regional differences that the average global viewer might find unfamiliar, and director David Fincher endows each of them with distinctive characteristics. All of this lends to the sense of a film that seeks to destabilise, not comfort, the viewer. The prison and the foundries have effectively been decommissioned, and the men, who roam freely, are simply there to keep things going. They yell and scream and dine with each other, wringing every bit of dark humour out of their desolate situation.
But for whom and what? The owners of the prison may be the Weyland-Yutani corporation, but what does ownership over a derelict prison attached to a non functioning mine on an abandoned planet mean? That is never made clear, but every day, the men wake up and get to their routines that include cleaning shafts and, it seems, moving dirt around. Under Ripley and Dillon, they fight the monster that has invaded their already deathly enclave, not with hope for any better future but, because, fuck it, why not, and fuck the fucking fucker trying to kill them all, fuck it all, they’re literally at the end of the fucking world anyway, and nobody gives a fuck. Nearly all of them die grisly deaths. Ultimately, it’s Morse, a slightly skeevy figure at first, who helps Ripley kill the alien and then herself, ensuring that the xenomorph will not leave the planet (at least for now). The corporation’s mercenaries shoot him in the leg and we see him at the end, the last survivor, hobbling but still defiantly yelling, “Fuck you!” as he’s led off in chains.
I thought of Alien 3 and how we view space as yet another junkyard when I watched an angry Gayle King denounce the thousands who mocked her and her fellow joyriders, for what she persists in referring to as a trip to space. In case you missed it: On April 14, Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin launched its 11th human spaceflight with an all-female crew that included King, the singer Katy Perry, Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and research scientist Amanda Nguyen. None of the women were there to do anything remotely connected to research, and the trip lasted all of eleven minutes, during which time they enacted various practiced stunts. Perry tried to promote her upcoming concert by showing her setlist printed on a butterfly-shaped piece of paper (it was too small to read), and holding up a daisy in her trademark wide-eyed way which, given the effects of gravity and a too-close camera, only made her look slightly manic and over-rehearsed. Sánchez brought out a stuffed animal named for a character in her children’s book.
You get the drift: this was not a flight but a trip for millionaires who wanted to feel that their money could get them something truly spectacular, an experience that almost no one on earth can pay for—all while selling their wares. Criticism of the four women (the two scientists have largely been left alone) has been hilarious, with even the fast food chain Wendy’s mocking Perry: “Can we send her back?” asked the restaurant’s account on Twitter. A host of liberal celebrities joined in on the mockery. To add to the humiliation, the U.S Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a Trump official, has pointed out that the women cannot be called “astronauts” under the definition set by the Federal Aviation Administration.
King has so far dug her heels in and insisted that this was a historic (all women!) trip and filled with the potential to help science (somehow!). Her rant, parts of which have gone viral, only exposed her cluelessness. In frustration, she asked, “Have you been? If you’ve been and you still feel that way after you’ve come back, please let’s have a conversation.” (I, for one, decided to take her up on her challenge, and immediately walked over to my local Space Rides store to buy a ticket: $999,999 plus taxes.)
The most revealing part was what King had to say about trash:
What Blue Origin wants to do is take the waste here and figure out a way to put it in space to make our planet cleaner. Jeff Bezos has so many ideas and the people that are working there are really devoted and dedicated to making our planet a better space.
There are significant problems with this seemingly simple idea of just throwing our trash into space, besides the fact that it’s just wrong (space is not a giant toilet down which we might flush our crap). The process would be phenomenally and ridiculously expensive, rockets might explode at any point—releasing our trash onto our heads—and there are better ways to deal with our waste problem on earth (creating less of it is a start). But, as it turns out, Bezos may not even have meant that he wants to think of ways to “figure out a way to put it in space”: he actually said that “all the polluting industries” would be placed “off earth.”
This is not just a rich man’s solution to a problem, it’s a first world one. The Guardian reported, in 2019, that “hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling.” At the time, the US shipped 1 million tons of plastic waste abroad, to countries like Bangladesh and Laos. Even inside the country, it’s not uncommon for cities like New York to literally ship their trash elsewhere. We could invent ways to either convert trash into something else or reduce our output, or both, but we are spending money to literally get it out of our sight. Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos’s vision for ending climate change is not one where we stop polluting our planet, but that we simply start polluting several others.
But what is waste? Who or what is defined as trash? On March 15, three planes carrying 261 Venezuelan men newly deported from the United States, landed in El Salvador. In Time magazine, the photojournalist Philip Holsinger writes about the process by which the men were led, literally and figuratively, towards the hell waiting for them in the infamous CECOT prison:
The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.
Dehumanisation is one of the first processes a prisoner is made to undergo. Much as a cow is branded and a dog’s tail is docked, an inmate is made to feel that his body is not his own, and that he is simply a trash human. The fictional characters in Alien 3 at least roam around their decrepit surroundings: those now trapped in CECOT will be stuffed into cells with 60 to 80 other men, and never allowed visitors. They receive nothing like educational programs to prepare them for a return to the outside world—because they are sent there to be confined forever.
It’s not a stretch to compare our attitude towards human-made trash and to those humans we regard as trash. The unquestioning cluelessness with which Gayle King repeated the idea of sending waste into space—as if that was a good thing—is not just symptomatic of rich people, but of those who identify as liberal or progressive, who fight against the tyranny of Trump but somehow missed seeing similar conditions during past Democrat administrations. For King, and for most Americans who don’t want to know what happens to all the plastic in the recycling bins, what matters is that none of it be seen.
As for prisoners: the U.S is home to about 5 percent of the world’s population but houses nearly a quarter of its prisoners. Under slightly different circumstances, we can imagine King saying the exact same thing about the incarcerated, with words like this:
What Blue Origin wants to do is take the criminals here and figure out a way to put them in space to make our planet safer. Jeff Bezos has so many ideas and the people that are working there are really devoted and dedicated to making our planet a better space.
Trump has treated the Venezuelans exactly as disposable trash, to be offloaded—at considerable expense—into a “tropical Gulag.” He has already raised the possibility of doing the same to American citizens. It may seem tenuous and unkind to imagine Gayle King, on the liberal side of the political spectrum, as being in possession of the same politics as Trump. But are liberals and Trumpists that far apart on the question of incarceration? It was the Clinton era that increased the criminalisation of welfare recipients and immigrants, after all. Michelle Obama spoke out passionately against the placement of immigrant children in “cages” during the first Trump presidency, somehow forgetting that the enclosures had been built by her husband. The federal prison population rose under Joe Biden. Prisons have historically been seen as engines of development in small town and rural America: those we consider trash humans are deployed as free labour to sustain failing economies, thrown into places that a rapidly shrinking media landscape, increasingly confined to large cities, will not deign to cover. The drive towards relentless incarceration is not a Republican or a Democratic feature: it’s a uniquely American one.
I suspect that if we were at the start of a Harris presidency, the high-octave and meaningless 11-minute Blue Origin trip would be celebrated, not mocked—even and especially by the same people who criticise it now. A President Harris would have been waiting, with Oprah Winfrey and a couple of Kardashians, for them to return, cheering wildly. Sure, liberal celebrities mocked the flight, but those same people—many of whom supported Harris for no reason other than the fact that she is a Black woman and not Trump—would have cheered a Blue Origin flight so wrapped up in the same kind of faux-feminism that was emblematic of Harris’s candidacy.
Trash, people, trash-people. The distinctions blur, humans become objects, and all of it is only meant to be thrown away, into prisons or space. Someday, if liberals, billionaires, and liberal billionaires have their way, even that last distinction may collapse.
If you like this, please consider supporting my work.
For more on Aliens and trash, see:
“Killing You Softly With Her Dreams”
On prisons and criminality, see:
“First They Came for the Criminals”
“On Trump, Immigration, and the Failure of the Left”
“On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative”
See also:
“Kamala Harris and the Art of Losing“
And my entirely correct prediction, written the day after her confirmation:
Image: Maynard Dixon, Gathering Storm, 1938.
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