Like denial, but creative

I’m locked in a beef with Sir Ridley Scott, director of such classics as Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, and Alien. Particularly Alien.

He, of course, has no idea we are in conflict. Nor should he care. But aware or not, he and I have a fundamental disagreement. About the aliens from Alien.

On one side, there’s Sir Ridley and his, dare I say it, misguided view of the genesis of the implacable Xenomorphs. He has spent tens — no, hundreds of millions of dollars supporting his take.

And on the other side, there’s me. Just some schmo with his own ideas. I haven’t made any Alien franchise movies, nor written any tie-in books, comics, or scholarly papers on the topic.

But that doesn’t matter. The odds don’t matter. Reality itself doesn’t matter. Because I have a powerful force on my side, a force that springs from a strong and fundamental urge of human thought and perception.

I have head canon.

What is head canon, you ask?

Allow me to explain. Right after the news.

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A natural history of the Xenomorph (actually, two)

When the Xenomorph from Alien first burst onto the scene (see what I did there?), they made a weird kind of sense to me. They seemed possible. After all, space is big. As the great Douglas Adams put it:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Combine that with this pithy comment from another well-known philosopher:

Life, uh, finds a way.

So of course there must be crazy stuff out there. Forms of life we can't even imagine. Combine all that with interstellar travel, and we're bound to get species raising havoc by hitching rides from one biome to another, like zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, or rats, well, everywhere.

And what about the Xenomorph's home ecosystem? What are they like in their natural environment, when they aren't trying to set up a makeshift colony by parasitizing humans? What if they aren't even the apex predator at home? What parasitizes them?

The story possibilities are, if not endless, at least galaxy-wide. There were six sequel movies, novelizations, original comics series, and several plays, including one on ice. The Xenomorphs even encountered the Predator and spawned a whole 'nother franchise with its own movies, comics, novelizations, etc.

So many stories still to tell, so many questions to answer. Answers that, if done right, will just raise more questions. Even after all these years, the possibilities make one giddy.

Sir Ridley, however, is decidedly ungiddy. As he said in a 2017 interview on The Empire Film Podcast:

I think the evolution of the alien himself is nearly over. But what I was trying to do was transcend and move to another story, which would be taken over by AIs.

Madness. With all due respect to an immensely talented Knight of the Realm, this is madness.

He's talking about the movies Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, where he reduced the evolution of the Xenomorph from actual evolution to one android going crazy and hijacking an alien technology to create the Xenomorphs so that he can use them to kill a bunch of people for...reasons.

I can see how for fans of auteur theory, the idea of "this was all one person's idea" has its appeal. But it also cuts off all the strings of what could be a rich web of beings and biomes, replacing it with a single metaphoric pin in a metaphoric map.

So how do I, as a lifelong monster fan, a guy who actually liked Alien: Resurrection, reconcile myself to this new, cauterized version of the Xenomorphs?

Easy. I ignore it.

With head canon.

Harmonizing contradictions

Here's the Wikipedia definition of head canon, from the page on Fan Fiction:

A fan's personal interpretation of canon, such as the backstory of a character or the nature of relationships between characters. It can be drawn from subtext present in the canon, but cannot directly contradict it. 

In my view of the Alien universe, the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant just didn't happen. Removal of those two movies is enough to restore all the possibilities of space being big and life finding ways. (I wish Alien(3) had never happened, but I don't want to be greedy.)

Now, you may notice that my head canon does contradict the current established Alien canon. And that contradicts part of the Wikipedia definition above. But it's a clean cut. I'm not changing anything, I'm just looking the other way occasionally. If you must, you could also call my take a retcon, an Alternative Universe, or even fixit-fic.

So it's OK for Sir Ridley to have his take on the Xenomorphs. And his take is the accepted canon. I have no argument with that. After all, he helped create the Universe from the ground up. And his whole "David, the 'Hannibal Lecter of Androids'" is an interesting use of the lore. He is more that entitled to it.

And (explicitly "and," not "but") I choose to imagine a different take. One without the events of Prometheus or Alien: Covenant.

The beauty of head canon is that both of these are things can be true – at least as true as fiction gets. I don't deny that Prometheus or Alien: Covenant exist. That's not the point. I just have my own story. So by definition, my take isn't threatened by Sir Ridley's. We can agree to disagree.

At least, I can. As I said before, Sir Ridley has no idea about any of this. So, as Walt Whitman never said:

Do I contradict Sir Ridley Scott?
Very well then I contradict Sir Ridley Scott,
(The Alien universe is large, it contains multitudes.)

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Over to you

My little tweak to the Alien universe is not unique. Us humans have changed, expanded, and mutated stories since back when they were told over campfires and on cave walls. It's another form of preservation, of dissemination.

And it's a useful exercise in mental flexibility. It lets you practice holding two opposing ideas, to see the beauties of each.

So what's your head canon? What story have you fixed? Let us know in the comments.

Until we talk again, I remain,

Your pal,

Jamie