Prometheus and the Ideology of Creation

           I’ve heard it said before that your story shouldn’t end with a punchline. If everything you’ve done only serves to prepare the reader/viewer for a single moment that retroactively justifies the entire experience, then you’ve done something wrong. 

            On some level, Prometheus is all about delivering the audience to certain “punchlines”—the big mythos-reinforcing moments where the Alien prequel calls back to the original and shows you how various disparate pieces converge to create a single chest-bursting, vent-crawling entity. To that end, the development of Prometheus’ plot can be seen as a sequence of events and set pieces all building to a particular moment: the derelict vessel-base, the mural depicting some kind of super xenomorph, the motif of the monstrous armored figure and what lies beneath its helmet, the wormlike proto-face huggers, the gross invasion of human bodies by alien species that burst out or are gruesomely extracted, the android decapitation, the arrival of yet another proto-face hunger that even behaves like its leggier counterparts, and, finally, the appearance of a baby xenomorph. 

            It's arguable that Prometheus is just checking the boxes. It’s an origin story but also one big homage. On the other hand, the fact that a film so thematically concerned with creation is itself one textual and metatextual evolution seems, if not intentional, then at least very convenient. We see the xenomorph physiology and reproductive system evolve. Likewise, we see Prometheus evolve into Alien. How do we get from big, pale, totally ripped giants drinking black liquid that tears apart their DNA to the events of the first Alien? Prometheus is here to show you.

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 27 May 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

            Like Alien, Prometheus has an interest in a strong, female lead. (Check off another box on the homage list.) However, unlike Alien, this film puts that lead through a not particularly inventive kind of hell. Noomi Rapace’s Shaw is barren—a fact that we learn moments before she and her colleague have sex and she gets pregnant… with a horrible alien fetus that she is forced to remove in a scene so horrific it makes the ostensibly horrific stuff that follows look like nothing by comparison. There’s something of the torture porn genre in Prometheus.[1] Shaw is impregnated thanks to the machinations of the android David who infects her lover with the Engineer’s black liquid; she’s forced to mutilate herself to remove the fetus, gets roughly stitched back together, and then spends the rest of the movie running and getting knocked around in ways that would almost certainly tear the wound open again. If she’s not doubled over in pain, she’s heaving and breathing heavily.

            Shaw is our “Final Girl,” of course, and like Ripley she’s destined to survive the encounter with the Engineers, but there’s something almost mean-spirited about the rough treatment she receives, particularly with the emphasis on monstrous pregnancies that so many other horror/thriller films have already drawn on (see Rosemary’s Baby for a seminal example of the trope).[2] The original Alien played off the creature’s unique physiology and reproductive methods to comment on a male fear of penetration (and possibly on the fear of the body being destroyed from the inside out by cancer or Crohn’s Disease). Prometheus isn’t that inventive. Instead, it focuses on the female body as a symbol of the power of creation, which is an idea even older and more worn than that of the monstrous pregnancy. 

            Anybody can create life, jokes the doomed Dr. Holloway.

            Not me, replies Shaw, tearfully.

            Thematically, the nature or purpose of creation is Prometheus’ chief concern. Its title recalls the noble mythological sacrifice of the Titan who brought fire to humanity and was punished for it. If not strictly a creator, Prometheus was at least a benefactor and arguably the figure, mythologically-speaking, who sparked humankind’s development by giving them something that enabled them to reach their full potential. The Prometheus of the film might be the Engineer race, who apparently descended from the heavens to help develop mankind in some unexplained fashion, but it’s also the ship that bears the name (as well as Shaw and company). The hope of the owner of the Weyland Corporation that funds the voyage is that the vessel will return to earth with the secrets of creation and of life and death: a new “fire” that could further fuel the development of humankind. The question that emerges as the film’s plot developments, however, is whether or not human development isn’t a double-edged sword. 

            We’ve seen this particular issue born out in sci-fi stories elsewhere. The main antagonists of the Mass Effect videogame series are monstrous “Reapers” that cleanse the galaxy of all life whenever technology reaches a certain peak. In Prometheus, the creators are also the destroyers. The Engineers created humanity but seemingly plan to destroy it. Prometheus is supposed to bring back the “fire” but just sets off a chain reaction that results in the creation of a new threat to all life. Was the Titan humanity’s savior by virtue of his gift, or was he ignoble in that the gift was a curse? After all, with our fire, we’ve gone from simply warming ourselves and cooking food to survive to polluting the planet and finding new ways to kill one another. Prometheus doesn’t provide an answer to this question because it never explains why the Engineers want to destroy humanity. Either this was a serious omission or the writers want viewers to think of our creators as capricious like Holloway suggests in his conversation with David. 

            We humans made androids because we could, says Holloway, to which David replies by arguing that humans would be devastated to learn that their creators did much the same thing on a whim. This is the closest thing to an answer to the gift-curse question at the heart of the film that the story offers: that “fire”/life is neither gift nor curse—it was simply something for Prometheus or the gods or Engineers to do when they were bored. Human life was a lark, and stamping it out would likewise be nothing more than something to do. It is a pessimistic outlook.

            Of course, Holloway is also wrong about David. Presumably androids serve important roles during space travel because of their relative immortality and the fact that they require fewer resources to operate while the rest of the crews is in stasis. It is equally unlikely that such a creation was built only on a whim. Furthermore, androids are superior to humans in many obvious ways—stronger, more durable, and with greater mental faculties. Even David’s supposed emotionlessness may not be strictly true. After all, in addition to admitting that he was afraid for Shaw during the final confrontation with the last Engineer, David’s treatment of Holloway also suggests that he can experience feelings like resentment. Having been the object of low-level resentment and mistrust throughout the mission, David’s decision to “poison” the scientist with the Engineer’s black liquid feels both coldly scientific and not quite impersonal. He even makes a point of asking Holloway to what length he would go to make the mission a success, thereby manipulating him into saying exactly what he knows he would (that he would do anything for the cause) so that he can justify poisoning him. David doesn’t need the justification, but his duping Holloway represents a bit of spiteful fun on his part. We appreciate  the dramatic irony of the question and what it entails and so does David. 

            David’s very existence and the parallel the film draws between his relationship with his creators and the humans’ with theirs, including the disappointment that comes with knowing the Engineers are all too mortal, calls into question the mythological importance of creators. David is superior to his creators, and humanity might likewise be superior to their own. After all, in addition to sharing the same DNA as their creations, the Engineers are also not immortal and may very well have their own questions about their origins. 

            Although we are told by Janek that the Engineer structures on the planet are a military installation and that the black liquid is a weapon, the evidence on display in the film suggests otherwise. Beyond their prodigious strength, the Engineers do not seem to be equipped with any weaponry. Their vessel is likewise unarmed except for the hold filled with deadly canisters. If it were otherwise, and the ship beneath the dome was military, why not eliminate the Prometheus after taking off to prevent pursuit and start the human genocide early? What goes unstated in the film is the possibility that the Engineers who were on the planet were scientists like Holloway and Shaw. The canister shrine room in particular suggests that the Engineers are scientists who have married technology and theology—at least, one might make that assumption based on the ritualistic arrangement of the canisters before the aforementioned xenomorph engraving and a massive stone idol head (which does resemble an Engineer and might suggest that they are self-worshipping, not unlike humans who like to render God as a man). Since the humans and Engineers are otherwise frequently paralleled with one another, this reading of the latter as scientists who have resolved in their culture the age-old debate between science and faith seems highly probable given that Shaw is doing much the same thing, personally and in her relationship with the less spiritual Holloway.

            Also, who is to say that the black liquid is actually a weapon? It could certainly easily be weaponized, but reading it as only a weapon of mass destruction requires assuming that the Engineers view life and death the same as humans do. The very first scene in the film suggests that they don’t. The ritual suicide of the otherwise seemingly healthy Engineer is presented largely without context; however, the act and its aftermath tells us a lot about the Engineers’ outlook on life and death and how it ties in with the black liquid. The Engineer willingly gives up his life to produce something new. His body and DNA break down, but the remains are repurposed rather than outright destroyed. Although the Engineers are certainly not without a sense of self-preservation, which is obvious during the sequence where the holograms are shown fleeing within the bowels of the dome, they may view self-sacrifice for the greater good or to further the development of life in the universe as necessary and not evil. Like the mythical Prometheus, the cost of advancing civilization is great personal pain. The idea that the Engineers might view humanity’s mass destruction as another step toward further growth is floated at least once in the movie, and based on the aforementioned visual evidence, the idea seems likely. The Engineers might have been hell-bent on wiping out humans, but the act likely wasn’t one they would see as evil. They would instead be creating new life from all that death.

             The Engineers might actually see themselves as Promethean, delivering to humanity the source of further evolution and development that Weyland is seeking. Ironically, though, the life it would deliver would mean the death of the individual who seeks, greedily, to preserve his own existence. The alien of Alien is an apex predator that results from the mass death of Prometheus. It’s the punchline of the film but also its literal and thematic culmination, suggesting that it may be the next step in Engineer-human evolution and therefore a superior being much like David is. To create is to risk being upstaged by the offspring, and to be a creator is to be outmoded, if not outright destroyed by the next generation.      

*

             Prometheus is a great sci-fi film. The futurism of the technology and the backdrop of deep space only serve as the icing on the thematic cake. This is a film concerned with deep-rooted questions regarding the ideology of creation and of humankind’s place in the universe. As someone with a religious background, I find the issues Prometheus interrogates especially salient. There are a lot of bad Christian movies out there: God’s Not Dead, 90 Minutes in Heaven, War Room. Stuff like Billy Graham’s The Homecoming (which I grew up with) has always existed on the periphery of the major movie business, which used to use “spiritual” stories like The Ten Commandments as an excuse to hype up the violence and sexuality of the film without censure. The new wave of theatrical Christian releases, however, is more dogmatic than ever—concerned less with thematically rich narratives and more with (literally) preaching to the choir. Ridley Scott’s own Exodus: Gods and Kings was so bland and uninventive that it’s hard to imagine the Christian it could offend.

             Meanwhile, films that explore Christian themes or stories that aren’t particularly dogmatic or traditional in their approach, such as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, are lambasted by Christian audiences for taking liberties with the Biblical source material—while it’s apparently ok to tell viewers that college professors are out to force students into becoming atheists and that victims of domestic abuse just need to try harder to be faithful to God rather than seeking real world counseling or leaving a dangerous situation. I’m sure that it offends some Christian viewers, but Prometheus is a film with an interest in faith beyond how one’s particular beliefs explain creation alone. Although belief in a specific creator (or creators) of the universe is not unique to Christianity, in the western world, it’s not hard to see Prometheus as a largely Christian film, especially given the way that human beings are fundamentally (at the genetic level) created in their makers’ image. What the film has to say about faith specifically isn’t entirely negative or ambivalent either.

            Prometheus implies that Shaw is a Christian, and she maintains that belief through everything that happens to her. While Holloway is quick to give up hope when the Engineers are seemingly all dead, Shaw continues to believe that there are still answers to be learned from them, though they may be physically absent. Furthermore, the question of who created the Engineers is also raised, so while Prometheus might be blasphemous for suggesting that God didn’t directly create humankind, it doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility that there wasn’t a divine hand involved. Since the Engineers are human on a genetic level, one extension of this revelation in the film’s universe is the possibility that the Engineers are the first humans created by God and we’re they’re “offspring.” The movie does question whether there is an afterlife or not, since the dying Weyland claims that there “is nothing,” presumably on the other side—a fact which the decapitated David seconds, though his agreement is not proof positive that Prometheus does not believe in an afterlife since David is, after all, is nothing if not duplicitous. Weyland himself is not religious in the traditional sense. Since this is the film’s final word on the subject, however, after young Shaw is seen posing the question of where people go when they die to her father in a flashback earlier in the movie, it’s not altogether impossible that it is suggesting that there is no divine hand involved, and if the Engineers aren’t the source of all life, then they themselves sprang from mortal origins.

            The point that I’m trying to make here is that Prometheus is a better “Christian” film—especially insofar as it tackles some big questions and themes relevant to that faith—than other movies that are explicitly marketed as such. Of course, this is my personal opinion, and my opinions trend more secular and liberal than many Christians would abide. The financial successes of films like the ones I mentioned before is proof positive that this super conservatism still exists. I think Prometheus is a good film for Christians who are interested in asking questions and entertaining “what if”/alternate universe explanations for the stories they’ve heard so many times before. It doesn’t serve as an echo chamber, though, and that seems to be what a lot of Christian films do—provide an experience that doesn’t question or even do much at all with the interesting ideas offered by the faith. There are no challenges to face or obstacles to overcome there. These movies are celebrations of a particular mindset and don’t demand anything of the viewer other than that they also celebrate that mindset. Prometheus is in its own way far from revelatory, though, and the nihilistic nastiness and quasi-misogyny lurking in its heart are nothing new.  

            Additionally, I’m not sure there isn’t something transmisogynistic about the portrayal of Charlize Theron’s Vickers. We learn that she is Weyland’s child, but he is apparently not pleased with her. In his fake will he describes David as the son he never had. Now, either Weyland is simply expressing his displeasure at having a daughter (an Assigned Female At Birth daughter), or he may be implying that Vickers is trans. She is depicted as a strong or even masculine figure (we first meet her as she’s doing push-ups, for example), and Janek asks her at one point if she is a robot—questioning her humanity but also, by extension, her realness. Possibly her womanhood. Consider also that when Shaw attempts to use Vickers’ medical equipment to extract the alien fetus that the machine explains it is “calibrated” to only treat men. There are other explanations for these weird beats, of course, but a reading of Prometheus as rather typically transmisogynistic (on top of every other typical thing it does) is still possible and very bothersome. 

            The box art and menus for the DVD emphasize three characters: David, Shaw, and Vickers. Vickers and Shaw both survive longer than any other human character in the story, but neither is treated very well. Shaw gets put through the wringer, and Vickers lives because she’s a coward. We are shown her antagonism early on when we learn she doesn’t share Shaw and Holloway’s faith. She’s a bureaucratic presence who refuses to let the wide-eyed scientist believers make contact with any intelligent life they might meet. She constantly wrests authority from the easy-going, likeable Janek. She’s designed to be unlikeable, and the possibility that she might also be trans means Prometheus, like so many other films, has nothing new to say about trans people either, suggesting instead that they are fake, duplicitous, inhuman, etc. Unlike Charlize Theron’s wonderful turn as Furiosa in this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the woman she plays here is less obviously a figure worth praising. Prometheus might feature two of its three (only three) female characters prominently and might cast itself as some kind of pseudo-feminist narrative by having Shaw survive, but its treatment of them—especially of Vickers—is questionable.

            After seeing Prometheus, I have since read a lot criticism levelled against it. More than anything, a lot of people have pointed out the illogical or just outright bad decisions made by supposedly intelligent people in the film as annoying typical. I’ve felt for a while now that most horror movies take place in alternate universes where for some reason the genre does not exist, and Prometheus must occupy a similar space. I can see the flaws now; however, when I was first watching it, I was very much swept up in the film and its mythology. It may hit a lot of familiar notes (some more problematic than others), but it’s also a film that seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. That it made me think about its themes at all is admirable, and I personally find it well-paced and beautiful. CG landscapes always look dead to me anyway—Disney’s attempts to create a sense of wonder with them in Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful have been laughably bad—so the stuff in Prometheus actually looks good because of how devoid of life it generally is. And that’s just another metatextual element that enforces the theme of the movie: From death comes new life. Of course, as a human being living a finite, fragile existence in a dangerous world (see the number of deaths by gun that have occurred in this particular country this year alone), that’s also a hard message to stomach.

Notes:

[1] According to Urban Dictionary “torture porn” is “[a] term coined by various critics which discusses the current trend in horror Hollywood which consists of horror movies having no story whatsoever but gratuitous images of people having random body parts removed. . . .” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=torture+porn). In essence, films like Saw and Hostel qualify as torture porn because of their heavy reliance on body horror—on creating a sense of unease, horror, or disgust by deforming, mutilating, or deconstructing the human body. The drawn out manner in which the removal of the alien fetus from Shaw’s abdomen is conducted feels reminiscent of this sub-genre of horror.

[2] The “Final Girl” is the female character in a horror film who is usually the one to confront and defeat the killer or monster in the end. Though her survival is not always guaranteed, she will last the longest, and according to TV Tropes, “[e]specially in older works, she’ll also almost certainly be a virgin, remain fully clothed, avoid Death by Sex, and probably won’t drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs” (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl).  Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods plays with this horror trope by building an entire mythology around the fact that characters in horror movies always fill certain roles (of which the Final Girl is only one; another is the stereotypical “stoner”), and Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws examines issues of gender and identification in horror films by suggesting that male viewers actually root for and identity with the Final Girl rather than the murderous, rampaging monster or killer (the ostensible source of their interest in the film).