by Julian White
The art calendar is quiet. I’ve been watching Alien: Earth, created by TV polymath Noah Hawley. My thoughts, in order, as the most recent episode played were:
“Ohhh that guy is Timothy Oliphant.”
“All these machines are too clean for Ridley Scott. I guess dirty is more expensive.”
“Oh, it’s going to be about how she can talk to the alien.”
“Boy Kavalier seriously just said ‘It’s my world, he just lives in it’, he is so cartoonishly ev…”
…and then I thought “No he isn’t”.
The main villain of this show—based on a blue-collar 1970s sci-fi horror fable about how gruesomely expendable we all become if a company decides it wants a new toy more than it needs us alive—is the feckless boy genius Boy Kavalier played by a twinky Timothée Chalament understudy named Samuel Blenkin. He wanders around in futuristic Coachella-dork loungewear saying things like “It’s my world, he just lives in it” all the time. I was thinking about how he—the evil genius who takes medically fragile children, moves their brains into robot bodies, tells their families they’re dead and sends them on crew-expendable missions to retrieve HR Giger monsters from other peoples’ spaceships—was cartoonishly evil. Even ignoring that, the things he says are…
And you know where this train of thought is going: We can both name—off the top of our heads—three or four totally real people actually running our country who say more insane things every week. And they say them on television.
I am not lamenting the state of our fine nation (at least not in this column) I am lamenting the state of our fiction. I want to see Boy Kavalier as poorly-written—a tediously flat character, lacking dimension and wholly predictable aside from the “did-he-seriously-do-that” factor provided by his callowly privileged confidence. But as soon as I think this, I think he is actually a more nuanced character than the actual major villains of real life (Kavalier actually knows his sciense, making him a notch more complex than the talentless men occupying our news feeds). The Overton window for what counts as a plausible character has shifted. I can hate Boy Kavalier but I can’t be bored by him—Alien: Earth’s unspooling of his schemes and follies is starting to feel like a compendium of important and prescient near-future speculation.
I wonder now, is this effect permanent? How many trash pulp creations of the past will begin to look like masterpieces of Orwellian prescience before the Trump era ends? Will Darth Vader and Ming The Merciless feel as deep as Macbeth before this administration is through?
Image: Courtesy FX