always missing the mountains

part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying

for the last one i don’t just mean oh the author inadvertently wrote in gay subtext or whatever i’m talking about media as a cultural artifact which can reveal a ton about societal norms, biases, ideals, etc. it’s all about positionality and an unexamined positionality is often the most revealing of all

ppl use "death of the author" to mean fucking anything they want on this site. i've seen people use it to fucking defend transmisogynistic jokes in movies??? thats literally the opposite of Death of the Author. thats Death of the Text. that's just not engaging with the conversation.

they practiced it on harry potter and now they just think it's three magic words that can absolve them of any media criticism

Death of the Author is the Intersectionality and Male Gaze of literary theory: a concept that is extremely useful but that is invoked by people who don’t actually know what it means despite it being well defined and originating in an accessible essay that people don’t read

Recommend everything by Stephanie Coontz