I’m eating this.
What’s the matter, man?
The food ain’t that bad, baby.
This is Aspen Beer–a fictional beer created for the movie Alien. What’s most interesting
about it is this, right here–Weylan Yutani with the Egyptian wings underneath. Weylan Yutani
is the mega-corporation that the characters in Alien work for and owns the Nostromo spaceship.
The company, which is never mentioned by name, has forced them into this dangerous situation
under the threat of losing their pay. So, is it just a coincidence that during this pivotal scene,
Dallas makes sure we the audience can see exactly who is responsible for Kane’s death? …Maybe.
You can see this Weylan Yutani logo on everything in the ship–the walls, electronics, cups, bowls,
crew uniforms, and even… Aspen Beer. The company owns everything–even the people it employs.
But this goes way beyond just logos. There is a dark satire intentionally
injected into the ship’s design that is hiding just beneath the surface of
this monster story–one that shows that the true monster is the company itself.
[Crew expendable.]
One of the first things you notice is how the aesthetic of the living quarters has
this cheap plastic vacuum-formed look to it. The necessity of having everything
functional and mass-produced makes sense for a mega-corporation that likely has a
fleet of the same spaceship, but because of that, the crew’s living space has this shiny
plastic quality that makes it look like they are living inside a McDonald’s restaurant.
The first thing that I’m gonna do when I get back is to get some decent food.
There is this kind of nauseating beauty in this corporate mass-produced hyper-functionality.
This wasn’t an accident, concept artist Ron Cobb
incorporated this aesthetic into his drawings for Alien.
Cobb said, "One of the things I enjoyed most about Alien was its subtle satirical
content. Science fiction films offer golden opportunities to throw in little scraps of
information that suggest enormous changes in the world. There's a certain potency in those
kinds of remarks” (alienfilmspedia). We’ll talk more about this in a bit.
What makes the Nostromo’s interior so unique is this marriage of practicality
and satire. It’s almost like pushing a corporate aesthetic
to the extreme like those freaky videos you see on liminal spaces.
Cobb’s overarching design style is defined by his obsession with functionality and realism,
which was probably instilled in him while he was providing
technical drawings for the US Military during the Vietnam War (Ron Cobb Wiki).
You can see how the idea of functionality shaped this
corporate industrial aesthetic even in his earlier designs.
Ridley Scott praised Cobb’s expertise, calling him a “NASA-level advisor”
(Fantastic Films Oct ‘79 - 14). Something Scott liked about Cobb was that he didn’t
[quote/unquote] “over-design” the sets (Alien Commentary).
But another key part of Cobb’s background leading up to Alien actually kind of goes against this
obsession with realism. From the mid-60s to the early 70s, Cobb worked as a cartoonist for the
LA Free Press, which really showed his dark humor and political views (Ron Cobb Wiki). Most of the
ones I’ve seen are specifically gallows humor about nuclear war, but the overarching theme of
these comics is, advances in society causing humans to lose sight of what’s important.
On Alien, Cobb would get a chance to combine his
obsession with function with his irreverent personality, in an albeit subtle way.
Standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.
The owners of the Nostromo are Japanese, so Scott wanted to
make sure there was a Japanese influence in the ship's design (Space Truckin’).
This idea came about because Scott wanted to work with French artist Moebius and ultimately
had him design the space suits. He wanted the space suits to have a Japanese armor aesthetic
which then made him decide that Weylan Yutani is owned by Japan (Rinzler 123).
According to Scott, this Japanese influence comes in the form of the Japanese supertankers
like Japan’s Berge Emperor that were around during the making of the movie (Fantastic Films Oct ‘79 -
21). And let’s not forget that the movie was made right before the 80s when Japan would experience
an economic boom that caused many to think that Japan would own everything in the future.
The name Weyland Yutani was itself supposed to be kind of a joke. Ron Cobb said,
“I wanted to imply that poor old England was back on its feet and united with the Japanese,
who had taken over the building of spaceships the same way they have now with cars and
super-tankers. In coming up with a strange company name I thought of British Leyland and Toyota,
but we obviously couldn’t use Leyland-Toyota in the film. Changing one letter gave me Weylan,
and Yutani was a Japanese neighbor of mine” (Speculative Identities). That said,
the company name isn’t mentioned or even really featured prominently until
later movies. They also didn’t add the ‘d’ onto the end of Weyland until the sequel.
Even though the brilliant French artist Moebius only had one design
that actually wound up in the movie–the space suits–his style was a major influence on the
Nostromo interiors because Ridley Scott was a huge fan (Space Truckin’).
Like a Moebius-designed ship,
Scott wanted an Egyptian feel with lots of round surfaces (Space Truckin’).
The Egyptian theme is present throughout the ship’s interior in the Weyland-Yutani logo,
a nod to the wings of Horus, which was designed by John Mollo. (Space Truckin’).
Ridley Scott: “The symbol above the monitor in the back, which is the wings,
was actually taken from an Egyptian temple and a lot of the elements,
architecturally, if you look around, are rather Egyptian” (Commentary).
The logo resembles a winged sun disk, which was used in ancient Egypt as a symbol of royalty,
divinity and power (Speculative Identities). Ron Cobb made a different logo that was
more of an industrial stencil with the interlocking W and Y.
I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is something satirical about appropriating
an ancient culture’s religious symbols into a design aesthetic for a business. We see this a
lot today with aspects of Ancient Greece being incorporated into the logos and names of Nike,
Starbucks, Good Year, and… Trojan Condoms.
It’s kind of funny to think of a future in which a symbol of a prominent religion
today is turned into a company logo because it looks cool. I guess governments have done this…
The hypersleep chamber is also suggestive of an ancient tomb, with the arrangement of the
cryo-chambers resembling a blooming flower (Space Truckin’). Scott said
that he approached the hypersleep chamber in a more atmospheric way
because he doesn’t think cryogenics is realistic (Alien Commentary).
Back to the old freezer-inos.
Up next, we’re talking about the story behind the famous plastic drinking bird,
but before we get into that, a quick message from this episode’s sponsor–Mubi.
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Coca-cola lipstick Ringo dance all night, dance all night!
Now back to the show!
To fill out the general clutter of the ship, Scott wanted to add in some small tactile details to the
set dressing, which is where the drinking bird toy came from (Cinefantastique V09 12). Scott’s
logic behind all these toys was that, wherever you go, even in space, there’s bound to be a
gift shop (Alien Commentary). He imagined that the crew would have collected these trinkets
at all the various spaceports they might have visited, which fits perfectly with this kind of
assembly-line aesthetic of the living quarters (Alien Commentary). Scott came up with the
drinking birds on the fly and had someone run out to a London store to buy some (Rinzler 187)
Scott thought of the living quarters as sort of like a hotel, where there
would be ten thousand of everything you could possibly need, but a cheap,
plasticky mass-produced version of it (Fantastic Films Oct ‘79 - 19).
Where’s the coffee?
It’s brewing.
Scott took some inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey here; he had been impressed
with the space flight to the moon base, when the character lies asleep with his food tray
in front of him, and how such ordinary details contributed to the movie’s realism like how
the space ship wasn’t that much different from a 747 (Fantastic Films Oct ‘79 - 19).
Harry Dean Stanton said, "Ridley wanted to make it look like flying in space was
like taking an airplane flight..Make it old hat;
make it as natural and commonplace as possible” (Rinzler 181).
Scott thought of “the crew quarters as where the staff of a Hilton Hotel would live” and
was inspired by the Aries flight in 2001 to have the walls covered with padding to prevent
injuries during times when there is little to no gravity (Rinzler 142). Of course, we don’t see
any zero-gravity moments in Alien and it isn’t explained how the ship has artificial gravity.
Scott had to work hard not to just copy 2001’s approach by straying
away from its clean future look, but he felt that despite his best
efforts the Nostromo still shows that influence (Alien Commentary).
One set that looks like it could have been taken straight out of 2001
is the infirmary. Cobb’s design for the infirmary was one of Scott’s favorites,
particularly the machine that scans Kane after the facehugger attack, which he called one
of the most realistic and beautiful pieces of future-tech that he’s seen (Alien Commentary).
Scott named 2001 as one of his all-time favorite movies,
and certainly the best depiction of futuristic technology to date
given how closely Kubrick worked with NASA scientists to develop it (Alien Commentary).
Kubrick also worked closely with various corporations knowing that they would be
heavily involved in the design and function of the future. Alien’s subplot with the Android Ash
working on behalf of the company and against his fellow crewmembers borrows heavily from
2001’s HAL 9000. And let’s not forget that H-A-L is one letter removed from I-B-M.
But perhaps even more interesting is that many of Cobb’s designs were even more
ambitious in the beginning, involving giant screens, computer readouts, and windows with
protective shells that would open to reveal planets ahead of the ship (Space Truckin’).
One of the ideas Cobb was most saddened to lose was his early design for the bridge, which would
have been a much more spacious split-level with giant windows (Space Truckin’). He
wanted a shot where planets could be seen rolling by on console screens,
and then the screens would open up revealing windows through which the actual planets would
be visible (Space Truckin’). But they couldn't afford it, so they had to use something more
along the lines of Star Trek, with no windows and a simple viewing screen (Space Truckin’).
These more elaborate ideas were scrapped to save time and money,
but a lot of them actually wound up being used decades later for Prometheus,
which probably makes more sense because the Prometheus ship was meant to be
state-of-the-art and the Nostromo was simply an old star freighter (Space Truckin’).
Mr. Ravel, starboard nine-degrees.
And let’s not forget that Weyland of Weyland Yutani traveled on the Prometheus,
which itself is a reference to Greek mythology.
Because the exterior design was supposed to look like an “intergalactic super-tanker”,
they purposefully avoided anything too high-tech on the inside (Cinefantastique V09 31). In theory,
they were going for more of a horror look, though Cobb personally disagreed with that
take and was at times frustrated with the limits of his influence (Mediascene #35 18). Cobb was
committed to a certain degree of realism given his knowledge and passion for actual aerospace design,
and he felt that many of those in charge simply couldn’t be bothered to care about things
like the lack of sound in space, gravitational effects, and stuff like that (Mediascene #35 18).
Another way the Nostromo’s design pokes fun at mega-corporations is
through subtle background details like industrial symbols and color coding,
in a way that was both a bit cynical and kind of funny (The Beast Within).
Cobb developed a futuristic spin on a universal signage that would be used by the crews of Weyland
Yutani ships regardless of the language they spoke. He called it: “Semiotic Standard For All
Commerical Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft” (Alien Anthology).
Ron Cobb: “It was like being trapped in a factory or something, so the way I wanted to
go along with that, I talked him into all of these industrial symbols around–color-coding
of everything–I thought that would be kind of cynical and create that industrial revolution
feel of people getting lost in machines, which I know is part of the metaphor. Some of them
were semi-humorous. So I was hoping they would––people would notice where, you know,
where––that black meant a vacuum, and that, and artificial gravity meant a red line
underneath. And if there was no artificial gravity, and it was black beyond this door,
it meant don't open it, you know. And so there's a figure of a little
space person floating upside down, and stuff like that, sort of in stress” (The Beast Within).
Even the colors of the signage had specific meanings. For example,
Red means “Viable, Sound, Alive, and Alertness,” Black means “Vacuum, Death,
and Hazard,” and Blue means “Lowered thermal condition” (Crews Project).
At the same time that all the signage is necessary and follows an internal logic,
it adds this machine-like quality to the environment where everything is a tool for
completing a specific task–even the people living on the ship. Like any other tool,
the people are replaceable and the company is willing to sacrifice
their lives if it helps the bottom line. And Ash is literally a personified tool.
Another bit of subtle design humor was the self-destruct mechanism. Scott liked the
irony that it would be necessarily complicated enough to prevent accidental detonation, but this
meant that Ripley had to basically read a manual while fighting for her life (Alien Commentary).
The emergency destruct system is now activated.
Notice too, that they don’t have weapons to fight the alien, but
instead tools that are meant to serve another purpose.
Just make damn sure nobody puts their hand on the end of it.
Cobb also designed a bunch of insignia designs that each had a specific purpose for the
employees of Weyland Yutani and included backstory for the company. For example,
this patch shows that the crewmember used to work for Red Star Lines before working on the Nostromo.
And this patch on Brett’s jacket is kind of funny–it was made for
the United States Tri-centennial in 2076 and is a collector’s item in 2122–when Alien takes place.
Before Alien came out, movies about the dangers of evil corporations were relatively underrepresented
New York City in the year 2022.
Nothing runs anymore. Nothing Works. But the People are the same.
But Alien would explore a new angle for evil corporations in movies–a corporation so big,
that it could be more powerful than a government.
The overarching theme that runs through the entire Alien franchise is how the cold
unloving hand of a giant corporation puts profits above the lives of its employees.
Director Ridley Scott said, “Weylan Yutani, which I figured at that time–and, in fact,
reflected in Blade Runner–that the world is eventually obviously going to be run
by companies and organizations, which seemed exotic [at the time],
but now it’s a reality. That’s where we’re headed. And so, this was speculation at the time. Funnily,
by the time I got to do Blade Runner, the idea was that the Tyrell Corporation was a mega-company,
which, at what stage does a company decide to have its own private army or protection
service? At what moment does a company become more powerful than a government? And so that
was always the subtext here and certainly was in Blade Runner” (Alien Commentary).
And the company itself is personified by Ash–who behaves as if a corporation is a person.
Corporations are people, my friend. No, they’re not!
For a long time, it seems like he is working on behalf of the crew until his true intentions
are revealed. And unlike HAL’s malfunction, Ash is functioning exactly as he is meant to.
The idea, according to Scott, was that the Weyland Yutani would plant an android on each ship to act
in the company’s best interest over the interests of the employees (Alien Commentary). After all,
what if the crew ran off with the resources they’ve collected,
or what if they pass up an opportunity to acquire an extraterrestrial for the
company just because they want to… you know… not be killed?
Want more videos on Alien? Let me know in the comments down below. And if you
want to suggest a movie for me to make a video on, please fill out the CinemaTyler
Survey in the description below. I’ve been doing this series on Alien because it was
suggested in the survey and that survey is what I’ll be looking at for topic ideas.