Alien and Paul Thomas Anderson, improving the present
The Alien: Earth series opens inside a spaceship modeled after the Nostromo from the seminal 1979 film. The crew's attire and the cigarettes they chain together confirm that, of all possible futures, we find ourselves in the one directed by Ridley Scott almost 50 years ago. Just as back then, the Artificial Intelligence that has the final say occupies a specific room, an evocation of the maternal womb populated by flickering lights, and communicating with it requires operating a noisy keyboard. It's an oracle at the end of a corridor.
It's exciting to see all this reproduced in a series that promises us Earth as a battlefield, because the retro-futuristic maneuver propels us back to the late 1970s. What does our planet look like from street level? Will we hear disco music? Will we see neon signs of multinational corporations that have disappeared from the map, as in Blade Runner ? Robots mimicking Nixon, a Berlin Wall extended vertically into the stratosphere, levitating ashtrays?
On the contrary, when the series lands, the world we're greeted by is a 2025 dystopia where no one smokes and screens are touchscreens. The series makes no effort to address this contradiction, and we're left with no choice but to accept that, instead of choosing between nostalgic fetishism and the conventions of the present, two separately profitable positions, here they've decided to put both in the same pot, and here peace and then glory.
In Paul Thomas Anderson 's One Battle After Another , there's a 16-year ellipsis after which the protagonists' lives are turned upside down, but what has changed around them? Everything we've seen before, the story's official past, is a section without a specific date, in which references to the present are slipped in, but which reeks of a late 1970s.
Where are we a decade and a half later? Exactly in the same place. We're still in the same perpetually outdated America. The military has taken to the streets and has carte blanche to monitor the citizens, but we don't see a single drone. It seems like the internet as we know it doesn't even exist.
For a film that astonishes with its dialogue with the most immediate current events, like an episode of South Park , it's shocking that it takes place in a fantastical America. Soaked in the past, crushed by a present that never ends, but in which, against all odds, there is hope for the future. Far from the conceptual laziness of Alien: Earth , probably encouraged by the executives in the shadows, Paul Thomas Anderson pisses on the calendar in the name of artistic triumph and the responsibility that every author pampered by the industry should feel.
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