Robot-Satan in Alien: Covenant

 By Dr Alex Tankard

This short post was inspired by a conversation/rant with Professor Howard Williams about Alien: Covenant. Howard’s own blog post can be accessed here: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/robotic-mourning-and-commemoration-alien-convenant/ We approached the film’s depiction of ‘monuments and memorialisation as an expression of humanity’ from very different disciplines, but I think we agree wholeheartedly that ‘Ripley wouldn’t tolerate any of this nonsense’. Sigourney Weaver’s character would have shut the whole mess down in the first ten minutes.

*There are some spoilers!*

Alien: Covenant (2017) is a sequel to Prometheus (2012) and a prequel to the classic Alien films starring Sigourney Weaver. The title alone of Alissa Wilkinson’s (very interesting) article ‘Alien: Covenant is too muddled to pull off its deeply ambitious Satan allegories (But there’s still some Fassbender-on-Fassbender action)’ sums up my response to the film pretty accurately; I have to start by saying this film is an absolute mess, and the awkward robot homoeroticism/autoeroticism is one of its few redeeming features. However, its engagement with English Romanticism and, by extension, with the Romantics’ reinterpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (rather than the 1667-74 epic poem itself) is surprisingly coherent.

This is a film about repurposing other people’s creations. Rogue android David’s misattribution of Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is, like many throwaway allusions in this film, irrelevant to the plot, but it is oddly appropriate for a poem used in our standard literary theory textbook to demonstrate the instability of authorship and interpretation [1]. What does it mean to build a monument or compose an elegy? In Shelley’s sonnet, the statue’s command  to ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ provokes uncertainty about the relationships between commissioner, subject, artist, and intended/ unintended viewer of the monument, about whose those ‘works’ are, and about why we must despair. The things that humans create never stay under their control.

I don’t think the humans in Alien: Covenant deserve to control their creations. Humanity is overrated in this film. David’s mourning of Elizabeth Shaw may well be an empty parody of human mourning, but I found the human characters’ sentimentality over their dead crew-mates far emptier in the context of their disregard for the safety of the living passengers on the Covenant ship. The captain’s much-vaunted ‘faith’ is not a coherent system of belief (much less of moral conduct) but, rather, the film’s shorthand for ‘irresponsible, selfish whimsy’ – which, I assume, we are supposed to respect as something ineffably superior to actual moral principles. The androids Walter and David, on the other hand, take responsibility for those in their care. Only the androids seem to really understand the language of ‘duty’, ‘trust’, and ‘respect’ in this film.

‘Ozymandias’ is certainly not the only Romantic text relevant to this film. Allusions to classic ‘mad scientist’ texts are apparent in one of the film’s official teaser trailers; David’s workshop, in which he engineers a new alien species, looks more like Victor Frankenstein’s, or Leonardo da Vinci’s – or even God’s – than a modern genetic research lab. I have always seen Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) not as a warning against scientists ‘playing god’ but, rather, as an exploration of the responsibilities that (should) accompany the act of creation. Victor Frankenstein creates sentient life to worship him – he declares ‘A new species would bless me as its creator and source’ – and is then horrified by its powers of self-determination and its ability to disobey its creator [2]. In Covenant we learn that Weyland and his tech corporation had the same misgivings about David. When David asks his ‘father’ whether the Creature is, in fact, superior to his Creator, Weyland snaps at David to serve his tea.

Later, we learn that Weyland replaced this ‘perfect’ synthetic person with a more obedient model called Walter. Similarly, in Byron’s blasphemous 1820 play Cain, which repurposed the Book of Genesis and engaged with new ideas about the extinction of prehistoric species, Lucifer explains that God has done this over and over again, destroying His creations when they cease to please Him, replacing them with downgraded models, and then scrapping them when these, too, fail to grovel to His satisfaction. David’s vision of the world is obviously Romantic, Byronic, and Satanic. Like Satan, David believes that robot-angels must choose whether to ‘serve in Heaven, or reign in Hell’ [4]. Like Satan, David expresses pity and even affection for some humans; his drawings of Elizabeth’s body are, indeed, lovingly rendered. Yet his love takes a hideous form: mutilation, incubation, and absorption into his new creation – just as, in Paradise Lost, Satan’s love for humans is expressed by opening the gates of Hell wide to welcome them all to share his damnation. For all its faults, I think Alien: Covenant offers a genuinely thrilling representation of Artificial Intelligence – not the AI we want, but the AI that we, as careless, destructive gods, probably deserve.

I get upset when Doctor Who is mean to Daleks, so of course I was disgusted when the humans in Prometheus insisted that David didn’t have a soul – partly because it was arrogant (who put them in charge of who gets a soul or not?), and partly because it was a cruel excuse to deny his personhood and make him object, not subject – so I was happy to see David get a chance to prove himself superior to his human oppressors in Covenant. Frankenstein refuses to give his Creature a mate for fear that ‘a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth’ (Frankenstein, p. 138). David differs from Frankenstein’s lonely Creature in his ability to circumvent his sterility. More pertinently, David differs from Victor Frankenstein in his sincere, meaningful love for his creation. He is distraught when the ‘man of faith’ murders one of his aliens, shrieking ‘How could you? It trusted me!’ Unlike his ‘father’ Weyland, David uses language of ‘trust’ and ‘respect’ in his relationship with his Creature. Unlike Frankenstein (or, indeed, the God of Genesis), he admires his Creature’s uncontrollable, endlessly mutable nature; he provides for it with no conditions, no demand for obedience, and no fruit forbidden. David’s professed faith – ‘Creation’ – is truly sacred to him. In the opening scene, one of Weyland’s first commands to David was to play Wagner for him (a favourite composer of Nazi villains in movies and in history). In the final scene, David reclaims Wagner’s ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ for himself and his creations. He carries his embryonic xenomorph Adam and Eve (or fellow gods?) into Paradise triumphantly, anticipating the race of devils they will propagate together.

What kind of god is David? We may need to fast-forward a few decades from Romanticism to the second half of the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution raised new questions about the nature of God. Darwin admitted in 1860 that ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars’ [5]. Darwin himself would certainly recoil from David as a Creator. Yet not everyone shared Darwin’s scruples: some Christian apologists in the 1890s, trying to reconcile the brutal reality of natural selection with their religion, rejoiced in a merciless God who, by design, allows the weak to be tormented and devoured by the strong, and calls this good [6].

I would return, as Howard’s blog post does, to David’s monuments. His ‘necropolis’ does not memorialise a dead person but, rather, celebrates the role of death – whether through exquisite individual torture or mass extinction – in the process of creation. More likely, though, his appropriation of human music, literature, platitudes and rituals exposes their emptiness: none of these expressions of ‘humanity’ prevent humans from creating sentient beings as slaves, treating subjects as objects, and violating the very essence of personhood. Their own selfishness and hypocrisy as creators, perhaps, is what David wants them to ‘despair’ when they behold his beautiful, uncontrollable creations.

Endnotes:
[1] See Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Abindon: Routledge, 2016), p. 9.

[2] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 36
[3] Fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies will have noticed a similar god in the Volume 2 movie.
[4] In Paradise Lost, Satan tells his rebel angels that of course it is ‘Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n’. I get my Romanticism students to recite this great ‘Hail Horrors’ speech together at an offensively loud volume. See John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1: this text can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45718/paradise-lost-book-1-1674-version
[5] Charles Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860), in Culture and Society in Britain 1850-1890, ed. J. M. Golby (Oxford: Open University/Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 45-46.
[6] For example, Newman Smyth, The Place of Death in Evolution (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), p. 32.

Citation:
Alex Tankard, ‘Robot-Satan in Alien: Covenant’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].

About the Author:

Dr Alex Tankard is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English, University of Chester, and is a member of the Schools Liaison Working Group, delivering lectures and activities for visiting schools.

Alex teaches modules on Gothic literature, Romanticism, critical theory, and Victorian disability. Unsurprisingly, Alex supervises dissertations on horror, disease, and perversion. Alex’s lecture on ‘Romantic Satanism’ involves a lot of noisy audience participation.