Entertainment Discourse


The First viewing of Alien

 

 

                                                                       

 

As far as entertainment goes, the movie ALIEN really did a number on me. I remember watching it, against my parents wishes, at a

friends house for the first time when I was about six or seven. I remember the room being competely dark except for the screen. I recall the beginning of the film having a lot of light in it. The walls were white, the furniture was white, everything was good. Until that white shirt was ripped open by a nesting alien inside of a man's stomach, spewing blood and gore all over the white.

 

 

                                                                                                                                 

 

 

 

After that... everything was dark. The shadowy, dimly lit rooms, the blackness of space, the actual alien itself. When I saw that alien rip out of his stomach, I was instantaneously introduced to an entire new aspect of film and life. 

 

 

 

 

Before watching Alien, the most violent thing I had seen was fighting on Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers. To be hurled into a completely different realm of violence showed me that I was really missing out on alot. The funny thing was, it didn't really scare me, in the traditional sense, but intrigued me. It made me wonder what else was out there... how far did the boundary go? Had I seen the most explicitly violent thing on film? All these thoughts, I remember, were racing through my head that night and wanting to find out more.

 

 

 

The recent viewing of Alien

 

After watching it the other day, it's amazing how much I remember about the film. The light and dark thing really stuck with me for some reason. I think, and I probably get this from my mother since she's an avid photographer, that I have an eye for color arrangements and when things are different from a whole. For example, when I do my jigsaw puzzles, the first thing I do is face them all up so that I can get a good look at the color distribution. Second, I pick up all the pieces that are similar in color. I don't know what it is, but I'm able to discern very slight differences in shades and colors, which doesn't seem like much, but in the business of film... lighting and color play a huge role. I think that's why I enjoy film so much. It caters to two of my favorite senses: sight and sound.

 

 

 

                    

 

This is also why Alien was so life-changing for me. It was a symphony of both visual and audial images that are, to this day, cemented in my brain. I will never be able to get the image of the man starting to choke and suddenly have a creature pop out of him

 

Viewing this movie is what really piqued my interest in film. When I watched it the other day, I remembered that when I was about ten or eleven, I would get online and read the scripts to the entire alien movies, and finding out what violent scenes there were, solely for the shock value. I began learning about more movies. Movies that were different from everything I'd seen before... a stark contrast with the cartoony, idealistic movies I watched as a kid.

 

 

I began thinking while I was watching the movie... was this film the sole reason I started liking movies? Was being jetisoned into a totally new realm of life all a product of my watching this movie? And the answer is both yes and no.

 

Yes because I believe the movie showed me that films could make you stay awake at night. They could make you sit and wonder about different possibilities and reactions. Ultimately, movies could manipulate feelings, much like the Kuleshov Effect explains, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to make something that made people say, wow, I feel ___ because I saw that. I want to go from an idea to a work of art. I want to piece all the shots together to form a vision, a spectacle of my work that makes people want to stand up and applaud because it's so profound.

 

No because many films did this for me. Movies like Indiana Jones showed me foreign locales and gave me an idea of what a hero actually was. Movies like Pulp Fiction that has several seemingly disconnected stories that tie together in one glorious epiphany. The feeling I get when I watch a film and figure out a key mystery or vital point to the plot, I feel as if I'm the only one who has discovered this secret. Like the director and I are on the same page and I totally understand what he's trying to say. It's a beautiful moment and makes me love film that much more.

 

The film industry itself is like space. It's a vast expanse that is dying to be discovered. New techniques can be applied, new concepts, the sky is the limit when it comes to making films, all you need is an idea and some creativity.

 

 

It's funny how the movie alien ties to some aspects of my family life. For one, the crew of the ship are alone together in space. Travelling through the unknown, with no one else but each other. It's alot like when my family and I moved around alot when I was young. It was like we were on a blue minivan spaceship, travelling to distant cultures and trying to retain a sense of self and identity while not letting anything "alien" infiltrate our tight group. I just realized that my family's path across the United States looks alot like a Star Trek symbol, and Star Trek deals with aliens and space voyages too. I guess at heart I'm a big sci-fi fan, it's just sad that it's a dying genre. No one gives credit to the final frontier and scoffs at the ideas of space travel and aliens. When I become, and yes I said WHEN, a major force in the movie industry, I'm going to revitalize the sci-fi industry. I'm going to show the world that, much like Stanley Kubrick did with 2001: A Space Odyssey, sci-fi can be a beautiful yet terrifying topic that, like space itself, is in great need of exploration.