Friday Ephemera (753)

That “nothing” is why it’s still a classic.

Yes, very much so. And while effective, the character set-up still has a pleasing economy.

In fact, the whole film holds up really well. The only weak points that come to mind are Parker’s struggle with the headless Ash – the hands really do need to move – and the closing shot of the creature being blasted by the escape shuttle’s engines. After all the careful use of shadow, of not letting us see, that one shot makes it clear we’ve been terrified by a very tall and skinny man in a rubber suit. 

In contrast, I saw most of Alien: Romulus a few weeks ago – it was uploaded in its entirety to YouTube – and dear God, it was bad. My flickering interest had been completely extinguished after about forty minutes.  

No lies detected.

And attempts at course correction are made triggering by the fact that the status quo, here and in the US, has been so perverse, to an extent one might regard as deranged, or treasonous. The degree of pretence and mental contortion that’s been required in order not to register the perversity, on so many fronts, is a tricky thing to undo. When so much imaginary piety has been staked on the affirmation of obvious wrongs, there’s a lot of resistance to overcome. 

Hence my discussion mentioned upthread, in which, for instance, arguing for secure, affordable electricity as a priority, a necessary precondition of just about everything else, is regarded as scandalous. Because if you’d rather that pensioners could afford to heat their homes and not face the prospect of Net Zero blackouts, in which someone will have to decide which cities are plunged into freezing darkness, then this makes you a bad person. 

Or at the very least, a presumed contrarian, a maker of mischief.

A government that doesn’t take energy security (and affordability) seriously can’t be trusted with anything else.

That would be my view. 

But again, we live in an age of pretending. Of fantasy pieties. In which anything remotely hard-nosed is met with gasps and fainting, and howls of pretentious indignation. As if a society could somehow be endlessly indulgent, endlessly accommodating, on an indefinite basis, without ever saying no. 

Because that would be terribly mean. 

Again, the point I made upthread – it’s difficult to convey to someone immersed in these fantasies of perpetual niceness, of endless accommodation, that their desire to be seen as nice, as never saying no, is precisely what makes them enablers of dysfunction and societal decay. 

Such that, if you champion Net Zero and other lunatic pieties, you’re making the scenarios above – little old dears freezing in darkness – much more likely. And if you want to throw open our doors to the flotsam of the third world, in limitless numbers, because you think that would make you look like a nice person, then someone else’s neighbourhood is going to rapidly go downhill, perhaps irretrievably. 

It’s hard to convey that idea, that reality, without the other person being somewhat resentful.