Wednesday 3 June 2015

Derelict as a temple environment in space

a) Transformation temple
In the 1990s my idea about the derelict mystery transformed by studying the way that in the Alien script had the derelict and the silo as two different places belonging to two different species and then they became part of the same vessel and the alien life forms soon were the cargo of the derelict ship rather than an invading life form. I was very interested though in how victims of the aliens were somehow being transformed into spores, originally going with the assumption that it was an actual metamorphosis taking place because of the photograph of Giger's original Brett Egg looking as if Brett was slowly metamorphosing into something. Later I discovered that Ridley's idea was that the human victims were literally being eaten alive by an alien life form.

b) The Demon's tomb
From reading a magazine article, I liked the idea that the derelict interior seemed like the inside of a demon's tomb and from Ridley's I liked the idea of derelict ship interior also somehow being a temple environment with the space jockey on his seat as a central icon and then I thought perhaps this meant that the silo was a crypt for a hibernating ancient civilisation in a form far removed from anything understandable. These temples might well be forming out of the subconscious perhaps. I liked the idea that something might be derelict and then somehow, and what the observer thought they were looking at might only just be icing on the cake as far as what it actually was. Later I would find out that the Space Jockey with its chair was largely inspired by the Sokar Funerary Barque used in ancient Egyption rituals.

c) Dissecting the derelict
Back in the later 1990s, I compiled a document of information called Dissecting the Derelict (which sounds a bit too much like the name of the book Dissecting Alien that came out a little earlier) to look at the possibilities that there were other ways to think about the mysteries of Alien, The Derelict Ship and the Space Jockey, rather than leave it as nothing more than what Jim Cameron said about the derelict ship in Aliens.  (See: My original essay from about 1998 Dissecting the derelict)

No comments:

Post a Comment