Practicalmadness

So I bought the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, which is nine discs including a few (dozen) hours of supplements, and special extended editions of every film. This includes Ridley Scott's not-so-aptly-named "director's cut" edition of Alien released to theaters in October, which I had put off watching until tonight.

For my money the single most significant change is the reinstatement of a deleted scene where Ripley finds out what happened to Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), which in the new cut happens just after she's set the ship to self-destruct. The alien didn't kill them, but started to set up a hive and cocooned them. She looks up to see Dallas still alive, and he moans, "kiiiilll...meeee..." So she uses her handy flamethrower to roast them and go about her business.

The idea that Dallas and Brett have just been trapped in the bowels of the ship for the whole movie adds a degree of pathos, and reinforces the idea that what the alien does is a fate worse than death. However, its inclusion is made problematic by the expansion of the alien mythology in the next few movies, where it is revealed that alien eggs are laid by a queen, and so a single "warrior" alien acting alone has no reason to take prisoners if it has no queen and no access to facehuggers.

The scene in Alien is, actually, truer to H.R. Giger's work than to the far less interesting sci-fi treatment in the next movie; the commentary track by Scott seems to indicate that Dallas and Brett are being turned into eggs, through some concept of insectoid sexuality that is far too risque and European for the King of the World, whose take on the aliens is only just barely harder-edged than a Spielberg movie.

This is backed up by the previous scene where, rather than use its tongue-mouth to eat Veronica Cartwright's brains, it slides its rather phallic tail around and up her leg, implying some kind of alien rape.

Obviously, a movie where the alien mates with Tom Skerritt and Harry Dean Stanton, then rapes Veronica Cartwright, is not going to be sequelized in _this_country. The alien can burst out of someone's chest and then kill five people, but it can't possibly be allowed to have sex.

Unless, of course, the majority of moviegoers who saw this scene (hypothetically in 1979, or for real in the 2003 cut) didn't quite understand what was going on (as I didn't right away), or try to explain it in the context of Cameron's later, safer version of the nasties.

At any rate, the scene was cut for pacing reasons.