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cellarspider · 1 month

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22/?? An old man, allegedly

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We return once again to that movie I wish to send the gift of a single tribble, Prometheus.

Yes, the movie’s gotten around to a twist it’s been clumsily foreshadowing for much of its runtime: Ol’ Man Capitalism, AKA Peter Weyland, is in fact alive and on the ship. I’ve been informed this was a relatively late addition to the plot, according to the available script drafts. His inclusion makes a stab at some themes. Let’s see how they do.

Content warning for deliberately gross old feet, weird religious imagery, death mention, Holloway mention.

Yes, David’s discovery of a living Engineer has meant it’s time to take Weyland out of the tupperware and reheat him for a bit. And it means we get to see Guy Pierce in the flesh, under a pile of old man makeup.

Weyland looks no less weird than he did as a hologram. In fact, he possibly looks weirder, because we no longer have that excuse for why he looks like this. Weyland is very frail, and very frail people’s appearance can change rather drastically in ways that aren’t usually put to film, but frankly, he looks more like Grima Wormtongue has been giving him investment advice.

Weyland is here because he thinks the Engineers can stop him from dying. I’m not certain he’s not already expired, and I’m also not sure where he got that impression. There’s a missing step of logic here, which the movie never mentions, but it’s likely related to the assumptions of christianized worldview: if something is the creator of humanity, then it must also have ultimate power over human life and death. Therefore, appealing directly to it can grant you eternal life. The cosmic watchmaker can replace your gears and keep you ticking indefinitely.

I will go along with this framing for just a bit, particularly because this scene is obviously reaching for some biblical imagery I’ll try and tackle in a moment. When the movie remembers to have characters engage with its themes, there are various reactions to the potential of meeting humanity’s creators.

Shaw is positioned as a true believer, but what that actually means to her is extremely unclear. She has some curiosity about the details of creation, so she’s not buying tickets to the Ark Encounter or whatever. She assumes welcoming and benevolent intention from the Engineers, but there’s never any indication of what she intends to do here, beyond prove herself right.

She’s also christian, and she thinks the christian God ultimately created the Engineers. How does that fit into her cosmogony? She has to be the sort of christian that takes Genesis as allegory, but what does it mean that humans were shaped by another species in their own image? Are humans more faithfully created in the christian God’s image than the Engineers were? Does she think the Engineers have souls? Are they angels?

We get no opinion on any of that from her. We don’t even see much of anything about how her apparently strong faith affects her life, beyond having a family keepsake and having belief in things. Holloway at least had an explicit goal in mind–it was a hubristic goal, but it was a goal. He wanted to get all his questions answered about life, the universe, and everything, answered personally, rather than letting anyone else get there first. Finding out the Engineers were dead immediately took the shine off of that, seemingly because he’d thought they were omnipotent and omniscient, despite being positioned as an atheist in the dialog.

Holloway’s position here was odd, particularly for an alleged scientist. He expresses that the creation of life turned out to be “nothing special” during his drunken funk. This echoes common misconceptions by deeply religious folks about how atheists and/or scientists think: the idea that if you’re so set on finding natural, rational explanations for everything, you’re doomed to view the world without wonder or beauty, just chemicals bouncing around for no purpose. That to seek the logic behind the world is to fling yourself into total anhedonia.

As many others have stated before, that’s not what comes out of it, what they’re describing is in fact called “clinical depression.” Understanding more technical details about how the world works doesn’t take the awe out of it, it makes it even more amazing. I’ve excitedly rambled to people that if sequencing tech was cheaper and easier, I’d love to study the genetics and epigenetics of weeds growing on dirt roads, to find out what makes them different from their cousins living only a few feet away in less crappy soil. The existence of a tuft of grass in dusty gravel is endlessly fascinating to me, and I know just enough about them to want to know more.

But no, Holloway’s behavior is common in depictions of atheists by religious people who fundamentally don’t get that one can exist around religious folks without secretly thinking the same way they do. It’s doubly weird, given how surface-level Shaw’s faith is, in a way that also seems to be written by somebody who doesn’t understand the concept too well.

In any case, Holloway got pre-disappointed in the answers he didn’t get, to the very basic philosophical questions he wanted to ask: why were we made? Do we have a purpose? Those sorts of things. Honestly, he could have had more complex things to say about this, even without dislodging his bro persona. Being a bro does not negate the possibility of thoughtfulness, it just means that thoughtfulness might be expressed differently. I didn’t see the movie doing that with him.

The only other potentially intentional thing it was doing with him is using the sum total of his behavior as a negative example: don’t question these things, it’ll lead you to despair and death. Not sure if they meant that, but the rest of the movie uses the punitive morality of some slasher movies as part of its basic structure, so it’s not an impossible read.

Skipping over David for now and going to Weyland: he’s all about what the Engineers can do for him. It’s a gesture toward people who approach christianity from a transactional angle. Faith in exchange for something. There are definitely people like that out there. A lot of premillennial dispensationalist evangelicals fearfully cling to the belief that, as long as they say the right words, they’ll bodily ascend to heaven and leave everyone else behind for the Antichrist, conveniently skipping that unpleasant “death” thing they don’t want to face.

For those who grew up with that stuff or those brainrotted enough like me to remember it, yes. Yes, I am comparing Peter Weyland to Tim LaHaye. The dialog in this movie is bad enough that it makes me think of Left Behind.

All of this stuff positions the Engineers as either equivalent to the christian god, or to the imperfect gnostic demiurge who is mistaken for a god. But frankly, the Engineers seem more like they were trying to make a sourdough starter, but the last time they opened the fridge, it’d grown fuzz and smelled awful. They were ready to throw out their project.

Was there a heavy ritual aspect involved in their actions? Sure. But the movie hasn’t sold me on the idea that they are themselves acting as christian allegory, only that christian allegory is being placed on them by others.

Speaking of Weyland and more christian stuff, he’s getting his feet washed by David.

Must be maundy thursday. Foot washing before entering a dwelling is a practice that started as a practical act in a sandal-wearing culture, and became one of power dynamics and religious symbolism. Water would be provided, or a host would wash the feet of a guest themself, or, if they were rich enough, a servant or slave would do the washing. This is very much the dynamic as far as Weyland is concerned. Weyland believes in souls, David, by his estimation, does not have one, therefore he serves humans.

Of course, foot washing also has connotations of humility, and is strongly associated in christianity with Jesus washing the apostles’ feet after the Last Supper. David has certainly and consistently shown himself to be more competent at everything he does than the other characters, and they wouldn’t have gotten this far without him. He’s working on a level they aren’t, even if he’s still forced to be humble about it. If this is the reading we’re meant to reach for, David’s managing a complicated double-act as Jesus (he’s going to be killed for the sins of man yet rise from the dead pretty soon), and also Judas (he is hella jazzed to betray somebody to their death).

In any case, Shaw tries to convince them not to wake up the Engineer. In response, Weyland essentially goads her about Holloway’s death and her beliefs: “And what would Charlie do, now that we’re so close to answering the most meaningful questions ever asked by mankind? How can you leave without knowing what they are? Or have you lost your faith, Shaw?”

Yes, indeed, Weyland, WWCD. Once you determine that, you do the opposite, and you’ll never be steered wrong.

So of course Shaw decides to go with them.

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Alt-text rambles

https://wheelchair.spinergy.com/collections/wheelchair-everyday/products/lite-extreme-lx

https://youtu.be/7h8zJHywjAw

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/

https://www.slashfilm.com/503786/first-photo-and-video-footage-from-robert-zemeckis-a-christmas-carol/

Overflow Ramble #1

I’m in wait-and-see mode on Fallout one right now. I’m not personally a FO:NV person, so I don’t have special attachment to the West Coast stuff, but I see what they were *trying* to do, even if it didn’t land with me at all (TL;DR playing a queer character felt especially bleak thanks to a lack of underground queer culture in the face of the homophobia).

The trailer looks good, there’s conflict between the BoS and NCR, which hopefully means both factions are going to be the absolute, incurable disasters they should be. Goggins playing a ghoul who helped sell the lie of the Vaults is good, and he’s a damn solid TV and character actor. Dale Cooper and 80s!Paul Atreidies himself Kyle MacLachlan plays the vault overseer, so that’s fun. I’m not a TV person so I don’t recognize the rest of the cast, but I’m hoping it manages to be something good. We’ll find out in April, by which point I’ll hopefully be fREE OF THIS MOVIE

Overflow Ramble #2: Tribulation Force

Close-up of Nick Cage deep in his “paying the bills” phase as Rayford Steele in Left Behind (2014), looking precisely as enthused as he should be, to be playing Rayford Steele. I chose this reaction image because I am not subjecting anyone to flashbacks of the older movies with Kirk Cameron in them.

Want to know how I know too much about this stuff, despite literally spending my childhood thinking people just entertained the idea of Jesus the way they did Santa Claus around the holidays?

Because of a blogger by the name of Fred Clark, who decided one strange day in 2003 to write a thorough dissection of the Left Behind books (cite 3). Thankfully for his sanity, he lost steam eventually. …When Tim LaHaye died in 2016. All fear and respect to Fred Clark.

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#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012)#this was entry 19 or 20 a week or two ago #And then I found more stuff to ramble about and so I had to restructure #I thought it was going to end at 25 but that's definitely no longer the case #w e l p

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thenorthernrecords · 11 months

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Brennen arrived in Nightfall around dusk. He felt somewhat somber as he stepped off the boat that had taken him there, unable to feel sorry for his late, traitorous thieving companion Clive. All the young man wanted to do was gain his father’s forgiveness and go home. It was the shame Clive never gave Brennen his family’s name. Brennen would’ve informed his father of his passing, although he doubted a man who would throw out his own son on the street would care...

As he walked into the town, he noticed that the town was rather quiet. Sure, quite a number of people walked up and down the streets, but everyone seemed on edge. The people would constantly and anxiously peer at the sky as if they were expecting something to fall on them. They muttered to each other in hushed tones, their faces seemingly etched with anxiety and fear. Brennen suddenly had a bad feeling, and he approached an older man with graying hair who was lowly speaking to two more older men.

“Excuse me, sir.” Brennen greeted, nodding as the man and his companions regarded him. “I just got into town and I kept help but notice that everyone seems to be afraid of something... can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Oh, you arrived at a terrible time, young man.” The old man grumbled, his companions nodding along in agreement. “There has been an attack close to our town, right in the woods.”

The man pointed towards the north and that’s when Brennen could make out a dark pillar of smoke rising from the sky.

“An army?” asked Brennen.

The man said, leaning in to whisper to Brennen. “People are saying it was a terrible beast...a beast as big as a sailing ship.”

Brennen’s brows furrowed, now concerned about what he just stumbled into. He already suspected a certain person who could turn into a beast... the same person whose estate was blown up to pieces.

“What sort of beast?” He asked.

The old man frowned. “I’m not sure. I was indoors when it all happened, with my friends here. You’ll have to ask someone at the tavern. No doubt everyone’s talking about it there.”

Brennen thanked the man and his friends and headed towards the tavern. The feeling of dread had now increased and while he wanted to let Ashlynn know what was going on, he couldn’t. There was still a few days left before he could use the speaking stone. Perhaps the woman Morgan, the person he was supposed to meet, knew what had happened.

He could only hope.

@caspianmaxson

#brennen #w e l p #so i'm gonna post in the nightfall chat when i can!

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