ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (23)

By: Marc Weidenbaum
September 21, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

THE XENOMORPHS

A corrosive line runs through the Alien franchise, and I’m not talking about the acid blood of H.R. Giger’s famous monsters. I refer to the grim corporate future.

Way back in the first movie, Alien, Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett, encouraged by Yaphet Kotto’s Parker, complains that “the bonus situation has never been on an equitable level.” Brett’s throwaway comment hints at not so much a subplot as the foundation of all of Alien: the cold-as-space calculus of post-democracy capitalism — or, Feudalism 2.0.

Brett and Parker grouse about the bosses in a way that everyday filmgoers can relate to. Characters like Paul Reiser’s Burke in Aliens serve as deplorable white-collar profit-motive agents whom audiences can focus their hate on.

In the prequels, we get a taste of the top-level post-human rulers, courtesy of Guy Pierce’s vile Peter Weyland, who is tellingly frail. By the time we meet him in Prometheus, ancient Weyland exists solely due to his ability to employ technology to reshape reality to his personal needs.

As for the androids, they are corporate pawns personified. Androids exist to push the consequences of capital down the slipperiest of slopes; they represent the elimination of empathy from business. Occasionally an android pushes back, but only to reinforce the outlier status of such characters, like Wynona Ryder’s in Alien Resurrection and David Jonnson’s in Alien: Romulus. “In space,” per the tagline for Alien, “no one can hear you scream.” In reality, these corporations hear you scream; they just don’t care.

And then, amid the archetypal dramatis personae, there are the aliens. Horrific as they may be, the xenomorphs of Alien are the main thing in the universe feared by the ruling class. Shadows made flesh, they are naturally more fierce than humanity’s most powerful weapons. They represent a scenario we can’t engineer our way out of.

Horror villains are often visually striking, from hirsute Sadako Yamamura of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, to Clive Barker’s self-explanatory Pinhead, to the mask introduced in Wes Craven’s Scream. Being seductively memorable is part of the job description. To varying degrees, such figures carry moral weight, spirits of vengeance that they are.

The aliens of Alien are also spirits of vengeance. They are the monsters on the other side of the line marked hic sunt dracones on maps. Outer space is a red herring; the line on Alien’s map is about abandoning humanity in favor of greed.

Take note that, as Ripley’s story proceeds, she goes from random human to powerful woman to ever more powerful human-alien hybrid. The lesson of her metamorphosis: for humans to rise up against their corporate overlords, they need — we need — to learn from the aliens. Ripley becoming post-human counterbalances the post-humanity that Pierce and his corporate ilk weaponize against humanity. Once I recognized the xenomorphs as the enemy of our enemy, I understood their attraction as more than cool design. They are icons of fortitude, constitutionally incapable of capitulation.

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ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (23)

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