Dark Star 1974
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Dark Star is the second film by John Carpenter, an author who will return to the figure of aliens many more times: with Starman and The Thing he will propose two diametrically opposites. With They Live and The Village of the damned, he will instead compose two controversial homages to the science fiction cinema of the past, imbuing it with rather urgent "political" themes.
Dark Star, of '74, however, remains unmatched in originality and passion. The story of the film, shot with just 60,000 dollars, in an atmosphere of creative goliardia, daughter of the American counterculture which insinuates itself, albeit ironically, throughout the work, tells of the spaceship that gives the film its title, busy around the galaxy and find unstable planets to deflagrate.
The rather heterogeneous and unprofessional crew spends its time listening to country music (one), eating synthetic food, passing the time in their small room furnished like a room on any American campus. In the spaceship there is also an alien (two), a kind of inflatable beach ball with two legs sticking out of the lower part of the sphere, mischievous and arrogant, which threatens the lives of the astronauts.
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Soon, our anti-heroes face all the dangers of space: the talking to the Bomb (three) is the precipitating point of Kubrick's parody between Strangelove and Hal 9000 (four); a commander dead but cryogenically preserved to ensure his mysterious brain functions; an on-board computer with a warm female voice, who creates disasters.
When the long voyage ends traumatically with the astronauts stranded in space, one of them, a surfing enthusiast, finds a wreck, mounts on it and rides through space as if it were the Malibu sea.
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Carpenter, ahead of his time, subverts every rule of science fiction and creates a highly intelligent parody of 2001: Space Odyssey and many other sci-fi movies, at times irresistibly hilarious. Everything, as in parody, is backwards: the algid and suffering astronauts of 2001 are replaced by the slightly hippy long-haired men of Dark Star. The teratomorphic aliens of the SF tradition are replaced by a little monster created in the garage, a veritable balloon, dancing in the narrow corridors of the spaceship. The narrow corridors of the spaceship, seems to represent a paradoxical (ingenious) ante litteram parody of Alien (five): irony on a model yet to come, or a signal that the alien 'on board' is also a well-known theme with foreseeable developments future.
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More simply, perhaps: the presence of Dan O'Bannon among the film makers, later the highly paid screenwriter of Scott's film. The alien, in conclusion, ends up literally deflated by the syringe shot to put him to sleep. Carpenter's alien-ball, then dies showing its character of non-effect special, and regains, with its own elimination, the exhibited implausibility of its threat.
Dark Star is a film about the anti-rhetorical, anti-academic and anti-heroic, which slowly projects into the future the seventies culture, a little Zen, of the fight against conformism, and thus of the critique of rational cinema, credible, harmonically structured, perfect cinema. The Kubrick's philosophical roiling finds a savage delegitimization in the mad confrontation 'on phenomenology' between the astronaut Pinback and the Bomb that wants to explode. Olivier Assayas points to the relationship with the languages established by Carpenter's film: "It is not parodying Kubrick, as much as using his aesthetics to explore a 'virgin' space of scientific anticipation, much closer to the comic strip; It is a universe in which lovers of Harvey Kurtzman and recent American comics will not find themselves lost".
Dark Star becomes a cult film for young as well as a flagship film of certain ideological protests (which Carpenter would never renounce: see the radical, misunderstood, Escape from Los Angeles). The film won many awards (Dallas, Edinburgh, Avoriaz). We conclude with the agreeable words of Fabrizio Liberti , when he states that with this film, imbued with immanent madness, full of characters immersed in abulia, without female figures and devoid of heroic-pathetic relationships between the protagonists, representing an alien childish game, "Carpenter builds his lucid attack on the American dream." Dark Star is an aporia in science fiction cinema, because it represents perhaps the genre's only attempt to make fun of itself.
Confusion about the meaning of Dark Star has prevailed since its release; screenwriter Dan O'Bannon had to publish an open letter to audiences so they wouldn't take it too seriously. O'Bannon had an outsize creative role, doubling as production designer and lead actor, and Dark Star gives us a glimpse in embryo of the next film he would write: Alien (1979). Alien is therefore sort of an anti-parody of Dark Star, but Dark Star is itself a parody of the work of a sci-fi writer whom O'Bannon greatly admired: Philip K. Dick. The mumbling, cryogenically frozen character of Commander Powell (six) seems like an unofficial Dick adaptation of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". The fatalistic Lieutenant Doolittle (Brian Narelle), a former surfer who just wants to go back to Malibu, is a typical Dickian protagonist: a man-child who senses that there is more to the world than meets the eye but is ultimately ridiculed into a resigned silence. If Pinback embodies the Heideggerian Grundstimmung of anxiety, Doolittle represents that of boredom. This boredom, in Heidegger's words, "removes all things and men and ourselves along with it into a remarkable indifference," an indifference that enables Doolittle to face his death with enviable casualness.
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Translations: Italian - Spanish
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We can remember it for you wholesale - Philip K. Dick 1966
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - Philip K. Dick.pdf