Said Alice (2)

So, yes, I went to the Cathedral to watch Charles ascending the throne on a big screen. 

It seemed the thing to do.

Grown-ups have talked about the Coronation all my life. There is a soap opera and a kind of chicken named after it. It is connected in my head with the Millennium and the Blue Peter time capsule. A thing I knew when I was little would happen when I was old. I could have watched it on my I-Pad, but I would have been tempted to make a cup of tea or check Twitter. I would have liked to go to the Abbey, but like Meghan and President Biden, I somehow got left off the guest list. I wanted to have a specific memory of the Coronation as a thing I did; not a thing I half watched on TV. I suppose I will be around for William's but definitely not for George's.  

And so the burning question is: did I or did I not pledge my true allegiance to his majesty and to his heirs and successors according to law?

Church services often involve public responses. May the Force be with you, and also with you. Do you renounce Francis Ford Coppola and all his works? The congregation even have to say "I do" during a Christening ceremony, even if they don't particularly know the Mum and Dad whose baby is being dipped in the font. There may even be a "Will you help and support the happy couple?" in the marriage service. 

A lot of people pretended to be very shocked that the coronation service was going to involve a public declaration of loyalty to the new King, and then a lot of other people pretended to be even more shocked that the first lot were shocked. One side were Orwellian and the other side were Traitors. 

What had actually happened was that Charles thought it would be a wheeze if the traditional Homage of the Peers (where members of the House of Lords say that the new incumbent is quite definitely king) could be replaced by a Homage of the People in which ordinary folk get to say so as well. In a last minute Anglican compromise, the good Archbishop decided to invite everyone to swear allegiance, instead of actually calling on them to do so. They were also allowed to say God Save King Charles if they didn't have the full script in front of them. I don't know why the BBC couldn't have scrolled it across the screen with a little bouncy ball. 

Yes, of course, I mumbled along with the rest of the congregation, as I would have done at any other service. 

Shall I tell you a secret? I have seen avowed atheists mouthing "I believe in God the Father Almighty" when they've found themselves attending church for some social reason. I don't actually see much wrong with that. Paris is worth a Mass. 

*

When the King of England started pushing Yankees around
We taught him a lesson down in Boston town
A very brave negro, Crispus Attucks was the man
The first to fall when the fighting began

*

I found it all rather beautiful and moving and impressive. 

I am sorry, but I did. 

I was particularly impressed, for some reason, by the choir singing "Vivat Regina Camilla!" Last year I was particularly struck by the simplicity of the Palace's announcement: "the Queen died peacefully at Balmoral" and without a pause "The King will remain here until tomorrow." Not even "the new King" or "King Charles": just "the King". 

Camilla looked utterly terrified throughout; Charles maintained the correct sense of dignity and bemusement and managed to refrain from swearing at his fountain pen. The reason he read the vows off the cards is that they are the part of the service with constitutional force and he has to get them exactly right. I enjoyed the Gospel Choir and the Greek Orthodox band and Sir Bryn doing his thing in Welsh. I nominate the curly haired lad with the freckles who enunciated just slightly too much as the Best Chorister, but the row of young chaps with big spectacles are very highly commended. Some of the barking mad pageantry is undoubtedly fascinating: I enjoyed Penny Mordaunt giving the sword to the king and the king giving it to the Archbishop and the King buying it back and returining it to Penny. 

It is strange to think that there is someone whose job it is to know all these stuff: the Royal College of Heralds, I suppose. I believe that part of the fun of being a Freemason is learning the ins and outs of a deliberately obscure rite. That's also part of the fun of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It is strange to think that there is still such a thing as the Royal College of Heralds. 

I don't think anyone could fail to be impressed by the theatre of the old man taking off his cloak and his tunic in order to be anointed (behind a screen). You can use words like "cos-play" or "dress-up" all you want: I like the theatricality and artifice. The actual King is dressing up as a King; the real King is role-playing being a King, with props and costumes which are the kinds of things we imagine a pretend-king ought to have. Orbs and coaches and robes and rings and gauntlets. If you don't go to church and aren't used to people wearing cassocks and robes and mitres and standing up and sitting down and kneeling I can see why it might all look a bit silly. If I were visiting, say, Oklahoma and had the opportunity to see, say, the investiture of a knew Shawnee leader I would most certainly go and I expect I would find it interesting and impressive. Finding it silly and quaint would be cultural appropriation, I shouldn't wonder.

*

Joseph got a royal pardon and a host of splendid things
A chariot of gold, a cloak, a medal and some signet rings.

*

C.S Lewis (we were bound to get to him eventually) thought that the Book of Common Prayer would, sooner or later, have to be revised: it was four hundred years old and words change their meaning. 

But he didn't think the church was ready for a new prayer book quite yet. He said that two things would indicate that the time was right. First, the Church of England would have to be going through a period of comparative theological unanimity; and secondly, there would have to be an obvious Anglican poet who was good at writing liturgy. You'd need to be at point when the Church was pretty clear what it wanted to say and had someone on hand who could pick the right words in which to say it. This seems admirable good sense. I think we can probably agree that neither condition was conspicuously met in either 1980 or 2000. 

I think something similar applies to the British constitution. Is there a broad consensus about what an English British Republic, or a reformed English British Constitutional Monarchy, ought to look like? Is there someone other than Olly Murs on hand to compose a new National Anthem and someone better than Pan Ayers to write a Presidential oath of office?

*

The King was in the counting house, counting out his money
The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose

*

The great Scottish Folk Singer Dick Gaughan once remarked that he couldn't make up his mind about Johnny Cash. "Sometimes I think he's great. But sometimes I think he's a wee redneck shite." I agree. But I am actually not un-fond of the Redneck Shite genre. The one about all the Texans getting slaughtered by the Mexicans in a fort, for example. The Johnny Cash monologue about the American flag somehow crosses the "so bad it's good" line and comes out the other side. On second thoughts, I do like to brag, I feel mighty proud of that ragged old flag. 

Of course, the Ragged Old Flag isn't about a piece of cloth, any more than the Old Rugged Cross is about a piece of wood. It's a metaphor, or possibly a symbol. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and the republic for which it stands.  

I understand that situation comedies have given British viewers the impression that the Pledge of Allegiance is more ubiquitous in modern American schools than is actually the case: but I was never as horrified by the idea as some of my fellow Corbynites seem to have been. I suppose if you want to go the whole way and imagine that there are no countries (which isn't hard to do) then we shouldn't be pledging allegiance to anything at all. But as long as we are allowed to have nations then I think we can probably have national symbols, and symbolic shows of loyalty to those symbols are somewhere between perfectly harmless and quite nice. People have put the Union Jack to bad use, but then the have done the same with the Hammer and Sickle and the Christian Cross. 

I do have a problem when devotion to a flag imbues the flag itself with magical properties. It's one thing to say that you bring her down slow every night, don't let her touch the ground and fold her up tight. That's a matter of form and etiquette. It's another to say that if you don't handle the flag correctly you are guilty of literal treason. Most of us understand the difference between The Flag as a symbol and the flag as a piece of cloth, although some of us sometimes pretend not to. Most of us understand that when we talk about loyalty to the Crown we aren't talking about being loyal to the thing on Charles' head, pretty as it unquestionably was.

*

William, William, Henry, Stephen
Henry, Richard, John, oi!
Henry, Ed, Ed, Ed, Rich two
Then three more Henrys join our song
Edward, Edward, Rich the third
Henry, Henry, Ed again
Mary one, good Queen Bess
Jimmy, Charles and Charles and then
Jim, Will, Mary, Anna Gloria
George, George, George, George
Will, Victoria
Edward, George, Edward, George six
And Queen Liz two completes the mix

*

We used to be told that the point of the Monarchy was that it stood above party politics. I used to partly believe it. I don't say that Prince Phillip was apolitical. Nothing is apolitical, not even David Attenborough or Rice Krispies. But the Silver Jubilee didn't feel like a Labour Thing or a Tory Thing -- it was just a Thing. There were actual Communists who pretended it wasn't happening, and young men with safety pins who were very rude about it, but most people were no more For or Against the Jubilee than they were For or Against the sky. Even the Punks were relatively amusing and quite cool; green hair and safety pins rapidly found their way onto postcards alongside beefeaters and fish and chips. The dissent was part of the festivities. In 1977 I pointedly didn't like pop music and would have thought that the Sex Pistols didn't play proper tunes. That's how sophisticated I was at the age of 13. Only since I started going to folk music have I been able to appreciate the punk's poetry of rage. 

Lee Anderson is odious, of course, and it's his job to be odious, but surely even he can see that "If you don't like the monarchy, your should emigrate" is a bit of cliche, a Viz level parody of what Mr Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells would have written, probably in green ink? 

But is it not rather counter productive? If the point of Charles is that he stands above politics, then why would a Monarchist work so hard to rebrand him as a Tory symbol, to spend so much time saying that Labour don't love our King? If you repeat over and over again that things are "as Republican as Apple Pie" then haven't you spoiled Apple Pie as a symbol of wholesome patriotism?

*

We're the flowers in the dustbin

We're the poison in your human machine

*

I read Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of King Arthur when I was maybe nine or ten; off the same library shelf where I found Chris Godfrey and in the same year I discovered Spider-Man and the Wombles. 

I read TH White's Once and Future King in the fifth form and washed it down with some Idyls of the King. The same people who did Children of the Stones did a TV show about a juvenile delinquent who turned out to be the One True King of England. His probation officer was Merlin. I was given both volumes of the Penguin Malory for my eighteenth birthday and read them all the way through, even the Tristan sections. My whole long Arthurian infatuation culminated in a multi year game of Pendragon . 

But even without round tables and swords in stones, the Kings and Queens of England the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Their other Realms and Territories have always been there. Victoria was not amused; King John was not a good man; one Henry inadvertently ordered his men to kill the archbishop and another one beheaded several of his wives. George the third went mad and Richard the third lost his horse and another Henry found the crown hanging on a gorse bush. Upon this charge cry God, for England, Harry and St George. Five bad kings and two genuine dates. I don't believe in the mystic Albion or that the king and the land are one. I am not sure I believe the King is the head of the Church; in fact I am not complete sure how the Anglican doctrine of succession works. 

There is much to be said of Rob Young's notion of Electric Eden. Folk music as the music of an imaginary England: the songs create the past. A mythology for England: who said that? 

If you want to be cynical about them, Coronations are historical cos-plays or expensive dressing up games. If you want to be less cynical, they are adding new chapters to a story which goes on an on forever. The beginning of the story might not quite stretch back to Lear and Cymbeline or even Ethelston and Cnut but it certainly goes back to Charles II and the Prince Regent. 

Can you enjoy the story, the holy oil, the ancient book, even if in these enlightened times, no-one believes a word of it? Or does that put you in the category of one of those clergyman who sings Jesus Christ Is Risen Today on Easter Sunday and then writes a learned article in the Observer about how it's all a load of bollocks? Do Charles and Camilla and Justin Welby and Rishi Sunak believe that God chooses Kings of England? Do they believe that King Charles is connected to a spiritual power-grid that draws power from Henry VIII and Saint Augustine and Saint Peter and ultimately Jesus? If they don't, then wouldn't we have to say that the whole operation is not so much a charade as a blatant lie? The Church of England carries on because one or two of the clergy and several of the laity really do genuinely believe in God. I doubt if one single person, in that sense, believes in Charles.

*

A dying race, numbly rehearsing the ancient ways in a blur of forgetfulness. But today, the ritual gives no comfort. 

*

By tea-time tomorrow, all this will feel very irrelevant. Sacred role-play will have given way to a silly Command performance and lots of cream teas, and by the end of next week, there will be nothing left but Duchy Original Shortbreads and equestrian march pasts. How long will it be -- days? weeks? -- before the Daily Mail forgets the loyal toast and denounces the King as a woke commie? Some people want to keep the King but lose the pageantry; I rather wish we could keep the pageantry but lose the king. The republicans want to scrub the illuminated capitals off the constitution and have a country that conducts itself in black typescript, rubber stamps and filing cabinets. And that would certainly be much more sensible. But I wouldn't march for it and I don't know if I could bring myself to vote for it. 

*

Do you think the king knows all about me?

Sure to dear, but it's time for tea.

*

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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 Pledge £1 for each essay.

Said Alice (1)

There are six protestors standing in the rain outside Bristol Cathedral. They are at a respectful distance; I think it is possible that one of the copious clergy has taken pity and brought them cups of tea. No-one seems particularly interested in arresting them. Perhaps they have made a conscious decision to have their demo after the ceremony is over; so they can't be accused of intimidation; or because they want to make their point without spoiling anyone's day. Or maybe anarchists just don't get up early in the morning. I take one of their "not my king" leaflets and said "jolly good arguments on both sides." 

You won't have read about this in the paper. Polite, good natured protests don't count as news. If one of them had got inside the cathedral and thrown an egg at the giant TV screen... we would probably have said "Where on earth did you get that egg from? Don't waste it. Lidl have completely sold out and I wanted to make a Coronation Quiche." 

They are singing to the tune of Coming Round The Mountain": You can stick your coronation up your arse; you can stick your coronation up your arse; you can stick your coronation, stick your coronation, stick your coronation up your arse. 

It is not the best constitutional argument I will hear over the weekend. But neither is it the worst. 

*

I know thee not old man; fall to thy prayers. 

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man

....but being awaked, I do despise my dream.

*

If Diana had survived the car crash, she would currently occupy a similar status to the Duchess of Windsor (nee Mrs Simpson); a posh old lady living in more or less contented exile in France or Florida, occasionally giving interviews; sometimes photographed from a distance like Marlene Dietrich.

If Diana had not separated from Prince Charles, she would be the very elderly king's very elderly wife; looking rather ridiculous in coronet and ermine. The Daily Mail would be writing nasty articles about how she had Let Herself Go. Beautiful women often age less gracefully than good-looking men. I am always slightly surprised to see photos of the young Princess Elizabeth and the young Prince Phillip and to be reminded how glamorous they once were. If she were still alive, a substantial number of people would be accusing Queen Diana of Treason because of long-standing rumours about the colour of Prince Harry's hair. Camilla would be a long forgotten scandal. Or just possibly, she would be sitting in the background, with some polite title like the King's Sister. 

If Diana had never married Prince Charles then no-one would have heard of her. 

On no possible time line could the beautiful shy young icon in those postage stamp photos have been crowned Queen yesterday, and it is slightly unhinged to suggest that she could have been.

*
But while the King was looking down, t

the Jester stole his thorny crown...

*

Two people at the screening were literally wrapped in the Union Jack (wearing plastic flags as capes). Alarmingly there was an elderly man with a trumpet and a dog dressed as a Chelsea pensioner, but he didn't do anything weird; nothing weirder than bringing a dog and a trumpet to a church service, anyway. The man behind me kept pointedly saying Ay-Men in a way that no Anglican has ever said Ay-Men before. When the procession got under way and a band struck up God Save The King a lady at the front not only stood up but gestured that everybody else should stand up. It became apparent that someone was going to play God Save The King every hundred yards or so, but mercifully she didn't insist on any more patriotic gestures. The Dean got up in the pulpit and led a prayer of her own and said that everyone was invited to join in the televised service as much or as little as they wanted to. So people stood up and murmured with exactly the same level of enthusiasm you would get in any other Church of England service. She double-checked that there were no deaf people in the audience and then switched off the BSL interpreter; which was a relief. I've seen Children of a Lessor God and Four Weddings And a Funeral and totally grok that it's a proper language but it's very hard not to find some of the gestures unintentionally comical. 

*

Too late to be known as John the First, 

he's sure to be known as John the worst: 

a pox upon that phoney king of England.

*

I would have been very much more impressed with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Oxford if they had said that Monty Python's Life Of Brian was a very clever and funny film, but that nevertheless they felt that it was wrong to make fun of Jesus. I would have been very much more impressed if some of the Muslims had been prepared to say that the Satanic Verses was a very fine novel but they nevertheless believed it contained a grievous blasphemy against their Prophet. I wish more people were prepared to say (like the young actors who appeared in her movie) that JK Rowling is completely wrong about gender despite having written some wonderful books which have given joy to literally dozens of children. (As an admirer of Dave Sim, Richard Wagner and John Lennon I get quite a bit of practice at this kind of thing.) But the impulse to say that Life of Brian is tenth rate adolescent comedy, that the Satanic Verses is meaningless, illiterate, unreadable verbiage; and to refer to the Potter series only as Those Shitty Wizard Books is very strong. 

You might also think that Rushdie writes a load of rubbish but ought to be allowed to carry on writing a load of rubbish without being murdered. Even Dilbert was quite funny until it wasn't.

Tony Benn used to deprecate republicans who said nasty things about the Queen. (He always spoke in terms of letting her retire with a generous pension and possibly even remaining in Buck House until she passed away.) I wish that more Republicans were prepared to say that the Coronation was a magnificent and moving service, replete with meaning and significance, brilliantly enacted; a good example of one of the things which our country has always been terribly good at, but that they nevertheless thought that now would be a good time to move towards an elected head of state. Or no head of state at all. 

Perhaps some Monarchists could say that they approved of the hereditary principle and a head of state who was not a politician, but that nevertheless the Coronation was archaic, expensive and a bit silly. 

I have a kneejerk reaction against cynicism and flippancy. Smartarses on Twitter and in the Guardian saying "Charles who?" and "What's so interesting about an old man in a funny hat?" make me all the more likely to go and watch it. As a matter of fact, he is your king. The argument that he ought not to be is one I am eminently prepared to listen to. 

Is the argument a purely aesthetic one? Are we talking about a difference in taste between people who like big ceremonies and people who don't? Would an elaborate investiture ceremony for President Attenborough or President Farage be just as bad as the coronation? Would republicans be basically fine with the monarchy if William IV were sworn in at a quiet ceremony in the church hall of St John the Baptist's Windsor, with quiche and sandwiches afterwards at the Horse and Groom? 

It's a bit like quitting the EU. You can whip up support for a single negative proposition, but unless you have some idea about what happens next a lot of us will stick with the status quo. I don't want to have an in/out abolish/retain referendum and then spend a decade arguing about whether what the people voted for was a Soft Republic or a Hard Republic or possibly the Australian model; and decades after that of both sides saying that this isn't the republic I voted for. 

We could have an elected president who rides around in a golden coach and is given magic gloves by Lord Singh. We could even have an elected King if that was what we really wanted: wasn't there a scheme at one point for George Washington to be called King of America? We could decide we didn't need a head of state at all: Kier Starmer could perfectly well become Prime Minister without kissing anyone's hands and we could take it for granted that Parliament was open when the new term starts. There's no particular reason why Charles and William and George couldn't carry on calling themselves Kings if some people wanted them to. Unless and until Kier Starmer abolishes inherited wealth, they would still be immensely rich. "Kings of England" could be allowed to exist, but with no more legal or constitutional standing than than the Pearly King Of Lambeth. I am not quite sure who owns the Crown Jewels, and I expect the Guardian would want them smashed up and used to make amends for the slave trade, but there is no particular reason that they couldn't be taken out of the museum and lent to the former royal family on solemn occasions. Is there a proposition on the table or are we still at the "republicanism Means Republicanism stage?"

You can say the same thing about Scottish Independence. 

When Helen Mirren appeared insufficiently sad about Diana it looked as if public opinion might finally turn against the monarchy. Fortunately Michael Sheen phoned her up in the kitchen and it all blew over. The day after tomorrow some dreadful scandal might erupt -- say if it turned out that the Royal family were more deeply implicated in the Duke of York's little peccadillos than they have been admitting -- and the country could turn republican over night. It is widely thought that Mr Rupert Murdoch dislikes the monarchy but feels it sells newspapers: that could change. But in any referendum, all the monarchists would go out and vote; and the six or seven republicans would go out and vote; and the apathetic majority would apathetically stay at home. No party is ever going to put abolition or reform in its manifesto, because if they did they would be crucified by the right wing press. And anyone within shouting distance of Ten Downing Street loves the reflected glory of a real live king. We briefly had a chance of a reforming Prime Minister but, we blew that because of beards and jumpers and murals, and, admittedly, because of the national anthem. It's like PR in the UK and gun control in the United States. A nice idea but it's just not going to happen.  

*

Louis was the king of France before the revolution
But then he got his head cut off which spoiled his constitution

*

On May 1st, a group of Morris Dancers (no, really) gathered in a green hill near Park Street in Bristol to watch the the sun come up and celebrate the fact that summer was a coming in and winter had gone away, oh. Mr Rumberlow got very jolly about it. I plan to go every year, but when it comes to the crunch, 4AM is a bit on the early side. It's an ancient tradition that goes right back to the 1960s; Morris Dancing is a pagan fertility rite that was dreamed up in Shakespeare's time and reinvented by some eccentric Victorian scholars. (Probably.) Everyone joining in the ceremony knows this perfectly well. Doing country dances on the first day of spring feels appropriate: and it says something about what you think about England and nature and music and sticks and handkerchiefs and bells. There's not that much difference between doing the kind of thing you think an ancient tradition ought to look like and keeping up a genuinely ancient tradition. And genuinely ancient traditions also evolve and mutate. Do the ceremonies still performed by American and Canadian First People's have historical continuity with their pre-colonial forebears, or are they partly revivals and reenactments? Highland games and the Gaelic languages are mainly inventions by the nationalist groups, but that doesn't mean they aren't important, and indeed, fun. 

The traditions associated with the coronation of a new King aren't nearly as old as most people think. Nothing is. But some of them are clearly pretty old: William the Conquerer is definitely depicted with an orb and sceptre in the Bayeux Tapestry. I don't imagine they played Zadok the Priest at Solomon's coronation in 1000 BCE, but anointing was definitely a thing they did to kings in the Very Olden Days. (Wasn't Zadok the villain in a dreadful Sean Connery sci-fi movie?) There will always be people who insist that these are exactly the same cakes that Alfred the Great burned, and will fight anyone who denies it. And there will always be people who think that if you can show that any part of the tradition is a later invention, the whole affair is debunked. But most of us can see that that there is a ludic element to religion and monarchy and folk music and don't have a problem with it. Evangelical Christians like to pretend that they are doing baptisms in exactly the same way that the primitive church did baptisms in the catacombs before being thrown to the lions, with very much the same guitars and very much the same overhead projectors. They also know in their hearts of hearts that that's nonsense: but it doesn't make the service less holy for them. Quite a lot of Jews admit that the Exodus, as an historical event, probably didn't happen, but they still do Passover. (David Baddiel is very good on this.) 

I do not, in fact, find it funny that an MP holding a ceremonial position had to perform a ceremonial duty involving a ceremonial object during what was undeniably a ceremony. I don't think that the fact that Monty Python made a joke about ceremonial swords in a comedy film about a legendary king makes it absurd that we use ceremonial swords in ceremonies involving real ones. (That was another good  argument against Life of Brian: if you ridicule religion or kingship in a big film, then ignorant people will come to find religion and kingship intrinsically ridiculous. That was also a good argument in favour of it.) And I certainly don't think "It's not really a feudal sword: it was made for Charles II in the seventeenth century" is a particularly devastating argument. A ceremonial item made in 1678 is still quite old. Older than the Conservative Party and Morris Dancing and America. Doing the same thing we did when the Queen was crowned, long before most of you were even born, still counts as tradition. 

continues

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Pledge £1 for each essay.

Alien: Director's Cut

I remember when Alien came out, in the magical void after Star Wars but before Empire Strikes Back, a space inhabited by Superman and Mad Max and Saturn 3. (No-one could hear me scream.) I was 14 and not allowed to see it, although being tall for my height I could probably have got into the Barnet Odeon if I had really wanted to. Other kids in my class did. Scary movies in those days were given a provocative "X" certificate rather than a clinical 18.

I was technically too young for Aliens-with-an-S as well. The first X-cert horror film I ever saw was actually The Fog. I don't think I have ever seen a properly dirty movie at a cinema. I eventually saw Alien at an RPG convention in Hamburg. (This must be true because no-one would bother to make it up.) That is also where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it suffered from the same problem. I already knew all the jokes.

We should be careful of using the word Iconic: it too easily slips into meaning "a good example of" or merely "a picture you may have seen before somewhere". You have certainly seen Alien before somewhere and Alien certainly is a good example of a movie of a particular type. It was a key text for the SFTTRPG community in the 1980s, and not only because it was the first scary movie lots of us had seen. It defined the sci-fi role-play aesthetic; at least until West End Games gave George Lucas a much needed kick up the franchise in 1987. Big, clunky, grungy space ships; the atmosphere of an oil rig or a military base; about as far as you could get from one of Chris Godfrey's test-flights or Captain Kirk's command chair. It's a bit of a throwback; less the first movie of a new era than the final hurrah of the previous one; it looks back at 2001 and Silent Running and the now de-cultified but then indispensable Dark Star much more than it looks forward to the Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner. The first shot, of the almost infinitely long Nostromo passing overhead seems to quote Lucas, but Lucas was quoting Kubrick. (Mel Brooks was very late to the party when he spoofed it in Space Balls; Lucas had delivered the punch line twenty years earlier.) 

The film evokes a very specific atmosphere; of a blue collar crew who go about in fatigues, moan about their pay and regard the discovery of an a extraterrestrial life-form as a rather tedious additional chore: you can see the same thing in Blakes Seven, Doctor Who (say, in the opening minutes of Invisible Enemy) and even Red Dwarf. My taste runs to the shiny and the mythic, Star Wars first, Star Trek second, everything else third; but I nevertheless find the industrial aesthetic quite appealing. I felt it while watching the first season of the interminable Expanse: I would quite like to be the film noir detective on the asteroid base who flollops into a dry-ice-smoke-filled bar and says something cryptic to someone mysterious while something foreign plays on a holo-screen behind him. Which is to say, I would quite like to role-play that player character, if role-playing games were still a possibility. But after not very long I find it boring to watch. I have never loved Blade Runner as Blade Runner deserves to be loved; and I read Ulysses for light relief after struggling through Neuromancer.

Alien aspires to be a documentary; it is desperately in love with machinery. The opening sections; the first descent to the moon which seems to go on for slightly longer than forever, is an endless montage of gears clanking and airlocks unlocking and landing rigs landing. The movie begins with a camera panning around empty cabins and corridors for seventeen or eighteen hours. Star Wars showed us technology out of the corners of our eyes: we wished we could have had a better look at the Millennium Falcon. But that's an illusion; once you've had a good look at a big machine it stops being a cool idea and just becomes a lump of metal. The same, of course, is true of hostile alien life-forms. 

Alien equivocates, wildly, about its setting. This tends to confirm my feeling that we are watching a game of Traveller, modern people with modern attitudes playing at being spacemen in the Far Future TM. There are those little blotting paper cocktail ducks on the mess dining table; one of the crewmen has cuttings from a soft-porn magazine in his locker; everyone talks modern slang. They say "robot" rather than droid or replicant. The one thing that all science fiction has always agreed on is that whether you are on Arakis or the flagship of the Galactic Patrol or an alternate timeline where Hitler won, people will always drink coffee. There is not the faintest hint about anyone having a life apart from the ship; even in the face of certain death no-one mentions wives or girlfriends or kids.

Space travel, and implicitly space mining and therefore space colonisation is commonplace: computers fill whole rooms but still have green Amstrad displays; and robots are common enough that you can live with them for months and not realise they are not humans. The question of how Ash works is not explicated: does he eat and shit and sweat and if you prick him does he not bleed? (The crew seem to be reasonably okay about taking most of their clothes off in front of each other.) I don't think we're in a galactic empire; I think everyone lives on earth but there are a few mining colonies on other worlds, close enough to access in slower-than-light-space-craft with cryogenically frozen crew. The implication is that they've been frozen for months; not centuries; there is no danger of them returning to earth and finding that the monkeys have taken over.

I think that this probably works in the movie's favour. Star Wars, after all, gave us Old Republic and Evil Empire and Good Rebellion and left us to fill in the details: Alien gives us people on a spaceship who refer obliquely to something called The Company. The dialogue, such as it is, is sufficiently naturalistic that we feel we are getting to know the characters, just a bit -- not quite identifying with them, but voyeuristically looking in on their day-job and their meal-times. We watch them coming to messy ends. We don't feel that the scary shit is happening to us. Ripley is sufficiently individualised that she doesn't tend to function as an audience avatar.

We're told that on first night screenings, audiences screamed and fainted and ran out of the cinema; that they covered their eyes because they thought the steam train was going to crash through the screen. The trailer pointedly showed you nothing but a giant egg and scary music. My local cinema showed a photo-cartoon-strip of the first 20 minutes, up to the finding of the egg, and then added "There follows a twist so unexpected that it will have you glued to your seats with horror." It is fashionable, and completely untrue, to say that spoilers don't make any difference or that a film which can be spoiled wasn't worth seeing in the first place. Star Wars doesn't depend on your not knowing that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father; although the impact of Empire Strikes Back was greater when we didn't know. But almost the whole horror of Alien depends on the Alien's life cycle being a surprise: what the hell is that thing stuck to John Hurt's face; why the hell has it fallen off him; and what the hell was wrong with those noodles that gave him such bad chest pains. The two big visual body-scare moments lose their impact once you know they are coming: the baby Alien emerging from Kane's body, and Ash being dismembered but turning out to be a machine. The special effects in the chest-burst scene now seem dated; god forgive me, the creature that emerges seems cute; and moves like a BBC rat in Victorian London. The android scene stands up much better, but is not particularly horrific once you take away the initial shock impact. There is some Hitchcockian tension as everyone crawls around the space ship getting picked off by the monster; but I struggled to be scared. Even if you had never seen the film before, it would be pretty clear that everyone is going to die and that Sigourney Weaver will be left making an heroic last stand in her underpants. Were first night audience's really tricked by the false ending?

I believe that the Ripley character was envisaged as a male in the original script; and certainly her role isn't particularly strongly gendered. The creature that emerges from John Hurt is comedically phallic; but the chest-burst scene could be regarded as a grotesque parody of childbirth. The glimpses we catch of the adult creature is mainly teeth. You could say that the film is full of imagery of rape and penetration, of birth and violation and toothed vaginas. But you could equally say that it isn't.

I understand that the director's cut differs from the theatrical cut in only quite minor respects, and that Ridley Scott now prefers the originally released version. One scene is reinstated that was cut from the 1979 release: the section in which part of the ship has morphed into an Alien environment, and we see two semi-dead crew members trussed up like Hobbits in a spider-lair, begging for death. In the end, all the sequels to Alien, and jeebers there have been a heck of a lot of them, ultimately derive from this lost scene. If you are a fan of Alien, it is the Giger/Mobius aesthetic that you are a fan of, weird curly gothic shapes like fossils and cathedrals and seashells cast in jet. No nerdish 1980s coffee table was complete without a copy of the Giger's Alien art-book, with a clear picture of the full-grown beastie staring weirdly from the cover. But rather the point of the movie is that we don't see the creature, just fragmented images of teeth and odd shaped heads and maybe a tentacle and a claw. The sequels -- and the comics and the roleplaying game and the action figures -- necessarily de-fang the movie. The partly glimpsed nightmare becomes a dangerous predator. It might kill you, but so might a Klingon or a bad case of food poisoning.

So I think I feel in the sofa lounge of the Bristol Everyman the same way I did in the video lounge of the games convention.The scariest movie ever made? Yeah; right.

Someone once said that there were basically only two kinds of sci-fi movie. The ones in which aliens (or a comet, or a plague) attack the earth and everybody dies; and the ones in which aliens (or a comet, or a plague) attack the earth and nearly everybody dies. So: an alien attacks a spaceship and kills nearly everyone. The one survivor makes a log entry and puts herself in cold storage and goes home. Was that, you know, it?

Seven friends and cat all try find egg demon before spaceship go home but is hardworking. Who will life to escaping? Who is bad milk blood robot? Scream not working because space make deaf.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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