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Remake of Alien

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a pack of wolves:
It doesn't matter to me all that much whether something was placed in a film as a deliberate attempt to influence the viewer's perception of events or if it was completely accidental, I'm always more interested in what's there rather than what the filmmakers intended to create. End result of studying English literature I'm afraid, the text and your reading of it is considered what's important and not where the name Weyland-Yutani came from and there is rarely such a thing as reading too much into something. My girlfriend once wrote several thousand words on about three panels from Maus. For example, I seriously doubt Emmerich's Godzilla was intended to be so sexist the result was that aspect of the film making me more angry than all the hideous things they did to Godzilla itself, but the end result is something that feels like an all-out assault on female sexuality. Having said that I wouldn't ever try and claim Western paranoia about the Japanese is a massive part of Aliens in the way it's plastered all over Blade Runner, but I think it holds some water as a reading of one aspect of it.

Alex C:
Yeah, but in a lot of cases you get to the point where it says more about the viewer than what's on screen.

a pack of wolves:
Depending on your outlook that isn't necessarily a problem. Barthes argues that meaning is produced only when a text is read so you can't talk about anything else except what happens when someone watches the film, not the film itself. Besides, unless we're talking about reactions to art there's really nothing to say. Without interpretation Alien is just some moving colours.

Alex C:
I think the conversation about what people take from any given work is worthwhile, but in such a case I'd rather we use less definite language than "stems from", since I tend to interpret such talk as attributing intent to the author, and I'm not really comfortable attributing that viewpoint to either the author or other viewers. I'm familiar with Barthes and I respect the idea that a work exists independent of an author's intent, but at the same time art is still often intended as a form of communication and on that note I am very careful about what I attribute and to whom.

a pack of wolves:
I don't think it removes communication myself, it just places the site of communication at the point where you watch the film and acknowledges that communication is mediated by a huge amount of factors other than what the author was trying to do. I share your reticence to attribute intent but that's why I pretty much never talk about what the author was trying to do and just talk about the text, so for me saying the conception of the aliens might stem from Western ideas about the Japanese isn't saying anything about the film makers but is just talking about the film itself. I can understand how it might sound otherwise since almost all popular criticism focusses so heavily on authors but I've spent too long in academia to change the way I talk now.

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