Parker: Uh, before we dock, I think we ought to discuss the bonus situation.
Brett: Right.
Parker: Brett and I think we ought to, we deserve full shares, right baby?
Brett: Right. You see, Mr. Parker and I feel that the bonus situation has never been on a, an equitable level.
Dallas: Well, you get what you’re contracted for like everybody else.
Brett: Yes, but everybody else, uh, gets more than us.
The minute the baby alien bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach is always the moment I lose interest in this film. Why? Because it is here that class issues are displaced by the struggle against the one enemy, the alien. Parker stops complaining about bonuses (class issues) and focuses on killing the killer monster. But this displacement is, in reality, more dangerous to Parker and Brett than the alien. Recall 9/11. It came down to the same thing. The anti-capitalist globalization movement (WTO) was displaced by the war on terror (WTC). I bring this up because as class tensions increase in our moment, the post-neoliberal moment, the moment when market ideology is in a state of crisis, it’s important to ask who would benefit the most from an alien something, before the eyes of everyone, bursting out of the nervous guts/conditions of our times?
