Alien: The World Jones Made

A draft extract from my forthcoming book 'Ego & Extinction: Ecopsychology and Science Fiction' (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2023)

I have now more or less finished one side of the monster […] As usual, I miss Müggi and Nönneli [Giger’s cats] —H. R. Giger, Alien Diaries, Saturday, July 2, 1978.

There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. —Charles Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860 (1)

The World Jones Made
“Come on, cat.”

When Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) closes Jones—ship’s cat of the Nostromo—back into cryogenic sleep in her capsule at the close of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), she closes the lid on the psychophysical eruption, or irruption of an archetype of the repressed ecological unconscious. The cat returned to its place under glass crystalizes Alien’s fearful symmetry of Nature and Psyche. Jones’ survival represents an illusion and its future, one that Ripley and the film’s audience require: the (re)domestication of the heart of darkness. Carl Jung’s paper on The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits, delivered in 1919 (the same year as Freud published his paper on “The Uncanny”) and developed through the late 1940s, is prescient of the experience of a film like Alien. Indeed, all horror narratives consist of irruptions and inundations of the individual ego by such a collective archetype in its aggressive return.