Is Ridley Scott’s film,
Prometheus—a film that has been met,
unfortunately, with disappointment and even contempt among audiences—actually
redeemed by its shortcomings? I, personally,
find it difficult to believe that poor screenwriting (there is some truly poor
dialogue) and pacing/editing can be explained away by a kind of hidden
signifier contained within the very errors of the film. I do, however, find it easier to believe that
one of the biggest flaws of the film—that it fails even remotely to answer any of
the questions that it raises (and the questions themselves aren’t all that
original to begin with)—can actually be justified (or perhaps many of you would
prefer to call it ‘rationalized’) if we consider the very nature of those
questions. So, today, I’m going to ask
my readers to consider two hypotheticals.
First: that Prometheus is,
hypothetically, an excellent film; and second: that its characters can only
engage hypothetically with its own themes.
Prometheus is a film about origins. Human origins. That said, it doesn’t answer very many
questions about them: Who are we? Where do we come from? Who made us?
And most important, why did they make us? The film is presumably aware that this is a highly
controversial premise; it is common belief in today’s scientific community that
no one “made” us, but that we are the historical product of billions of years
of evolution. Yet the film also pits the
“ancient aliens” scenario (called Engineers in the film) against the
creationism scenario, even introducing one devout character who wears a cross
around her neck; two discrete brands of intervention and manipulation of the
human race, two intriguing possibilities for explanation as to our biological
origins. Prometheus is, we can say with some certainty, aware of the
familiar territory it is treading, and almost painstakingly aware of its own
concern with this territory. Why, then,
does it appear to lose all sense of direction well before its rather anticlimactic
conclusion? Why are the grand yet
redundant questions that it raises almost completely ignored?
First,
we have to realize that these questions are not ignored by the characters. Over and over again we’re reminded through
dialogue of the characters’ desires to learn about their creators, the
hypothetical Engineers, and the final scene wherein one Engineer is awoken from
stasis (perhaps the most climactic moment of the film) demonstrates ad nauseam
the characters’ almost childish obsession with being given an explanation (with
the character of Doctor Shaw even exclaiming: “Why do you hate us?”). This should make it clear to us that it’s not
as though the writers completely forgot what the primary catalyst for this
narrative is: an obsession with origins.
They remind us at every turn that we’re dealing with an exploration in
creation (merely recall the android David’s line: “Big things have small
beginnings,” as he examines some biological drool collected from a strange
cylinder found in the site of the alien Engineers).
Second,
we have to remind ourselves that there is an obvious reason why the question of
origins is such a colossal question: it has, still, not been answered. The film doesn’t offer a form of alternative
history, a genre that depicts historical events that are factually different
from its actual course. We have to force
ourselves to accept that what it posits is a hypothetical history: one that is
not proven or positive, or even plausible, but one that is possible. The plot of Prometheus hasn’t been negatively criticized because it deals with
subject matter that is entirely ridiculous and impossible. Rather, it has been criticized because the
plot apparently fails to resolve these issues that it raises. But is this a failure on the writers’
part? Some of us might be inclined to
venture that it is not, especially if the ultimate goal of the writers is to
create a sequel that promises to unravel the knots of its predecessor and make
even more money in the process. And it
must be acknowledged that surely, in the business of Hollywood, every script,
even the most aesthetically practiced and artistic, barely conceals the hidden
signifier of the dollar sign.
But
now let’s seriously consider the hypothetical.
Let’s give Mr. Scott the benefit of the doubt, and argue that these
glaring omissions in the film’s plot were done intentionally and for what we
might label “high artistic purposes.”
What might those purposes be? It
is here that, I believe, a deeper discussion of the concept of origins will be
beneficial to this examination.
In
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” theorist Michel Foucault offers an interesting
interpretation of the concept of origins.
He writes: “The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before the body, before the world
and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a
theogony” (NGH 372). Considering Prometheus’s clear reference to the myth
of the eponymous titan (whose story is summarized in the film by the character
of Peter Weyland), it’s clear that Scott has made this intriguing
connection. The Engineers fill this
obscure, mystical position previously reserved for deities. Furthermore, one viral advertising campaign
for the film depicted Weyland giving a speech in his youth, and claiming that,
because of humanity’s discovery of new technologies, “we are the gods
now.” In Prometheus, human discovery and exploration results in a
supplanting of the original creators; the human characters seek to understand
their ancestors, but there is a kind of maniacal drive to dominate concealed
beneath this journey. Jean Baudrillard
relates this obsession to the pursuit of origins, often manifested in the guise
of “mythological object[s]”; Baudrillard
makes the interesting claim that underdeveloped, more primitive cultures fetishize
power through recourse to technological (i.e. futuristic) objects, whereas
advanced, “civilized” cultures fetishize the authority and authenticity of
their own origins through the mythological object (SO 88). In Prometheus,
the humans occupy the unique position of being both the primitive and advanced
culture. The clues about the Engineers
are discovered as part of humanity’s past, its history; pictographs found in
the paintings and literatures of ancient civilizations have pointed to the
involvement of the Engineers. Hence,
humanity views them through a lens of advancement. However, the humans also acknowledge the
technological advancement and authority of the Engineers, since they
(purportedly) are the beings that created humanity itself, and the journey to
find them takes the human characters into the farthest reaches of space. This is a narrative of traditional science
fiction, and it places the humans in the spot designated for the
underdeveloped, primitive culture; the people who are seeking some profound
technological knowledge. So humanity
occupies both places in Baudrillard’s conception; the advanced and the
primitive.
This
displacement results in a certain amount of anxiety placed upon the human
explorers. This anxiety is not purely
their hesitance and, eventually, terror upon arriving at the alien site. Rather, I intend anxiety to mean the
compelling desire to find the Engineers, to commune with them, and, perhaps, to
become the privileged recipients of some form of transcendental knowledge. To come to know our forefathers, but also to
relieve them of their elevated status in our history. Baudrillard summarizes this urge as follows:
“For we want at one and the same time to be entirely self-made and yet to be
descended from someone: to succeed the Father yet simultaneously to proceed
from the Father” (SO 88). He then goes
on to make a remarkably poignant statement: “Perhaps mankind will never manage
to choose between embarking on the Promethean
project of reorganizing the world, thus taking the place of the Father, and
being directly descended from an original being [emphasis added]” (SO 88). The quest Baudrillard is describing, the
quest that the film depicts, is a Promethean
quest; a quest that will provide a new established order, will create a new
structure of knowledge, but that is ultimately doomed to fail.
How
does this quest provide a new established order or structure of knowledge? Baudrillard is not the only one to make this
connection. Foucault also claims that
“the origin makes possible a field of knowledge” (NGH 372). What does this mean for the human characters
in Scott’s film? Foucault expands upon
this initial claim: “The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point
where the truth of things is knotted to a truthful discourse, the site of a
fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost” (372). This is not a very optimistic outlook on the
discovery of origins; for Foucault, they become impossibly and hopelessly lost
amidst a tangle of discursive knowledges, conversations that preserve remnants
of the truthful origin at the cost of concealing the entire, “pure” thing. For Foucault, history reveals “not a timeless
and essential secret but the secret that they have no essence, or that their
essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (371). Put even more bluntly, what lies at the
historical beginning is not some total, pure origin, but “the dissension of
things […and…] disparity” (372). The
genealogy that Foucault is outlining is one of impossible truth. This is because, for Foucault, knowledge is
(in a sense) antithetical to truth.
Fields of knowledge, “truthful” discourses… these things do not expose
the truth, but paint it in new, sometimes even preconceived colors. This is because any human discourse on
origins is an anthropocentric interpretation of an utterly pre-human essence. They can provide no revolutionary
re-structuring because they merely revolve around the potentially incendiary
kernel of their question. The origin of
humanity is not human, and the Promethean quest of Scott’s film is doomed to
fail because it too is an example of such an obscuring discourse. The scientists and explorers in the narrative
seek a human explanation for something entirely alien and foreign. Questions such as “Why did you make us?” and
“Why do you hate us?” are human questions, and it is naïve to assume that they
would even make sense for an alien culture (I’m referring not only to language,
but also to the very concept of “why” itself).
It is worth positing that Scott is aware of the idiosyncrasy inherent in
such questions.
For
Foucault, this profound awareness of and obsession with the past is a modern aspect
of humanity. He writes: “We have become
barbarians with respect to those rare moments of high civilization: cities in
ruin and enigmatic monuments are spread out before us; we stop before gaping
walls; we ask what gods inhabited these empty temples. Great epochs lacked this curiosity, lacked
our excessive deference; they ignored their predecessors” (384). Is the characterization of humans as
barbarians gaping before ancient monuments not an accurate description of the
human characters in Prometheus as
they explore the alien site? These
characters, the entire narrative of the film; all of it is a representation of
the epitome of human fascination with its origins, a fascination that has only
been enhanced over the years as technology evolves and history flows on. However, this inevitably leads us to another
impossible question: where is the process of historical development leading
us? In a way, Prometheus is a reaction to the failure of science and philosophy
to answer this question.
Baudrillard writes
elsewhere of the failure to predict the future, and the consequences this has
had for humanity. He claims that the
idea of finality, the end-point, is what gives a historical movement its
purpose and meaning (Passwords
59). He also claims that we have reached
a point in our development where we have exhausted our hopes for understanding
the future, and have thus turned to the past: “So, unable to locate an end, we
strive desperately to pin down a beginning.
Our current compulsion to seek out origins is testament to this: in the
anthropological and palaeontological fields we see limits being pushed back in
time, into a past that is also interminable” (60). This offers us an interesting complement to
Foucault’s notion of the recent human obsession with origins; not only is this
obsession a recent development, but it is also a reaction to our inability to
determine our end (I would ask readers here to recall the tagline for Prometheus: “The search for our
beginning could lead to our end”). Now
we can see how Prometheus not only
conflates Baudrillard’s sociological conceptions of the primitive and advanced
cultures, but also the quests for our beginning and our end. Impossibility converges within the film like
a concentric tidal wave collapsing inward, drowning any and every hope of
exploration outward; a discursive black hole, a historical singularity that
allows no truth to escape. Baudrillard
also offers us another poignant comment: “The problem raised by history is not
that it might have come to an end, as Fukuyama says, but rather that it will
have no end – and hence no longer any finality, any purpose” (61). If history has no end, how can it hope to
have any beginning? With no end in
sight, only an impossibly infinite cascade through time, the origin can only
ever become an intangible, primordial fantasy.
We continue to strive for it, and yet it continues to evade our grasp
and elude our understanding, constantly vanishing just beyond the terrestrial
and cognitive horizons.
In
the face of this impossibility, humanity must increase its effort. If mere knowledge and exploration will not
suffice, then we must resort to coercion.
The simplest way to explain this, in historical context, is imperialism,
and it manifests in what Foucault’s calls the “will to knowledge,” similar to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power: “The historical analysis of this rancorous
will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there
is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for
truth), and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous,
opposed to the happiness of mankind)” (NGH 387). This argument is, of course, central to
Foucault’s entire theory, i.e. that structures of knowledge are the result of
relations of power. However, in Prometheus, imperialism is turned on its
head, for it is not the humans at the helm of imperialist conquest. Instead, the Engineers are the ones in
possession of destructive forces beyond all measure, and of a quality that is utterly
foreign. One merely needs to consider
the bewilderment and horror of Native Americans at the unveiling of the
Hotchkiss guns to find a suitable analogy.
The twist of Prometheus,
however, is that there is some historical connection between the weapons of the
Engineers and the creation of humanity itself.
This connection is only hinted at in the film, and the details are never
revealed, but the implications remain rather unsettling: the origins of
humanity, whatever they may be, appear to be intertwined with a cosmically
destructive bit of alien biotechnology (which hints further at the creation of
the alien creature from Scott’s iconic 1979 film, to which Prometheus is a pseudo-prequel).
Destruction begets creation. Beginning
and end merge in a vulgar dialectic relationship, where humanity finds itself
stranded between two unreachable poles, which are only reconciled in their
common elusiveness.
In
the case of Prometheus, the genre of
science fiction allows a hypothetical exploration of the impossible closure of
history; both its origins and its conclusion remain beyond human
understanding. No matter what the film
attempts to do, any representation that it offers must remain constrained by
the images of Western historical preconceptions. When we observe history, we are not looking
at some pristine, pure, untouched object.
We can only, ever, look at it through the lens of modern Western
ideology. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst
explain this notion perfectly:
To be accurate the object of history is whatever is represented as having hitherto
existed. The essence of this
representation is preserved records and documents. History’s object, the hitherto existing, does
not exist except in the modality of its current existence, as representations…
What the past is is determined by the
content of the various ideological forms which operate within the parameters of
historical knowledge. (qtd. in Jameson 473)
The origin, history, past foreign cultures… these can
never be encountered except through
representation, since all remnants of these objects in their original context
have vanished (if they could ever be said to have existed in the first place). Prometheus
is filled with characters who fantasize over the notion of discovering and
understanding their own origins, but who can only encounter those origins
through objects, architecture; the remains left behind by the culture that
purportedly created them. There is no
origin in this, only the human interpretation of origin. All these objects take on the status of texts
through which the human characters attempt to read the evidence of their
beginnings; but ironically, the human characters cannot read the actual text
left behind by the Engineers. They rely
on David, their artificially engineered counterpart (the analogous “human” to
their own status as “engineers”), to read the alien language for them. Yet throughout the entirety of the movie,
there is no guarantee that David ever completely understands the language of
the alien beings. The only interaction
with a living Engineer, at the film’s conclusion, yields no actual
communication (in fact, it yields only violence). Prometheus
emphasizes that no direct contact can be made with the ancient aliens; theories
and beliefs can only be interpreted through representations, through dead
objects deprived of contextualization.
From the very beginning of the film, the human efforts are all in vain.
In
the end, the film’s approach to historical understanding can be explained
through Fredric Jameson’s ideological duality between “Identity” and
“Difference,” the former of which posits the availability of ancient knowledge
within our own cultural ideology, and the latter which posits the impossibility
of such knowledge. Prometheus depicts an interpretive methodology that adheres to the
latter conception, wherein, because of “the radical Difference of the alien
object from ourselves […] the doors of comprehension begin to swing closed and
we find ourselves separated by the whole density of our own culture from
objects or cultures thus initially defined as Other from ourselves and thus as
irremediably inaccessible” (453). Viewed
in this light, it becomes irrational to expect any viable explanation from the
film if its very point is to emphasize the impossibility of an
explanation. Alien objects and texts
reveal no hidden essence because of their own impenetrability, and instead of
exposing some hidden secret, betray the disappointing fact that they have no
secret, no potential revelation. As the
android David states when he is told that humans made him simply because they
could: “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same
thing from your creator?” As it turns
out, Scott doesn’t give his audience much more to go on. The result is just as disappointing, but this
isn’t necessarily a fault of the film’s presentation. Perhaps it has more to do with the very
nature of its quest.
It’s
not my intention to justify poor writing or pacing on the film’s part, and I
certainly believe that it falls prey to these flaws (it’s no Alien, that’s for sure, and the pacing
and atmosphere of Prometheus don’t
come close to matching the visceral, terrifying organism that was its
predecessor). It is my intention to
explore the themes that Prometheus
attempts to tackle, and these themes are not easy to unravel. It could have offered its audience an
entirely fictional conclusion, some fantastical resolution from the depths of
writer Damon Lindelof’s sci-fi-steeped unconscious; but would this have been as
rewarding? Could an explanation of human
origins ever hope to transcend our wildest spiritual, mystical, or scientific
beliefs? It’s my claim that Prometheus’s failure ultimately betrays
to us our greatest illusion of all: that there was any origin to be found in
the first place. And, just as the origin
remains concealed in primordial depths, so the ending as well may never
materialize. Perhaps it’s much more
plausible that the endings we fantasize about (the Nostradamus prophecies, the
year 2000 CE computer crash, the 2012 Mayan calendar, etc.) are nothing more
than illusions imposed by us on our own existence in hopes that some final
purpose might be revealed.
In light of such
pessimistic ideas, it’s understandable why the sign of the cross around Doctor
Elizabeth Shaw’s neck might be far more inviting to some.
Works
Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Passwords. Trans. Chris Turner. London, Verso: 2003.
-. The System
of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London, Verso: 2005.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and
Epistemology.
Ed. James D. Faubion. New York, The New Press: 1998. 367-391.
Jameson, Fredric. “Marxism and Historicism.” The Ideologies of Theory. London, Verso:
2008. 451-482.
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