Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
H.
R. Giger's biomechanical art combines the organic with the
mechanical, human bodies with machines, biology with technology.
Typically, his bodies are female. Dehumanized, they lack
consciousness; sometimes, they appear to be catatonic or even dead.
Were they analyzed according to Martin Buber's categorization of
relationships, the female figures in Giger's art would be involved
in—not participating in, but involved in—an “I-it,” as
opposed to an “I-thou,”
relationship. In Giger's art, women are not flesh-and-blood
creatures, or not entirely; rather, they are biomechnical hybrids,
more dead than alive, and they are more subsumed by the mechanical
than the mechanical is subsumed in them.
Often,
the female figures' involvement in these associations with mechanical
systems is compelled, rather than voluntary; the females are
restrained, held in place by mechanical arms, pipes, vises,
form-fitting chairs, needles, or masks. They appear to be nothing
more than human hosts to industrial parasites or to a system
comprised of interacting mechanical parts. Often, their eyes are
closed or completely white, lacking both irises and pupils. It is as
if their humanity has been extracted along with whatever the needles,
tubes, pipes, coils, clamps, suction hoses, hydraulic devices,
cables, pumps, phallic appendages, beakers, and baths extract from
their mouths and other, more intimate, bodily orifices. Giger's
paintings are impersonal, detached, disinterested, and, in this
sense, inhuman, depicting scenes that involve actions resembling
rape, although it is questionable whether the machinery of technology
can commit such an offense in any real sense of the word.
Of
course, someone had to create these fantastic hybrid female-machines.
The existence of biomechanical factories dedicated to exploiting
human females implies that other human beings, perhaps men, since
their sex is almost completely absent in Giger's work, designed and
operate this system for their own benefit, albeit for mysterious
purposes. If men are in charge of the system, if they have converted
the females of the species largely into a power supply or an
exploitable resource of some kind—chemical, perhaps, or sexual—they
must be inhuman; they must be monstrous, indeed, to have deprived
women of their lives, of their liberty, of their pursuit of
happiness—and, indeed, of their very humanity itself. One would not
be surprised to find someone like Josef Mengele in charge of the
sadistic, clandestine, mechanized operations.
Each
painting depicts a nightmare world unto itself, disconnected from any
other. Each of the paintings suggests a narrative, but none connects
to any other, and none explains the situations it depicts. It
is as if each one is the start of a tale which begins in media
res, but never progresses beyond
its beginning. Therefore, each scene is without context and without
meaning, an existential nightmare devoid of significance from which,
like Jean-Pal Sartre's No
Exit, there is no escape.
Perhaps this is Giger's vision of modern life, a world in which men
operate a vast system of machinery, preying upon helpless, dehumanized
females like parasites feeding upon hosts, for purposes unspecified,
but likely involving, at the very least, sex and exploitation.
Most
of Giger's work is unique, in a class of its own, but a few pieces,
those he designed for various film projects, do have a context,
although not one created exclusively, or even primarily, by Giger
himself. However, he often expressed his enjoyment of the movies'
scripts. His comments on some of his work on specific motion picture
projects may suggest insights concerning his overall intentions as
an artist.
Giger
was commissioned to create some potential designs for the movie Dune,
including Harkonnen, a castle symbolizing “intemperance,
exploitation, aggression, and brutality”—all elements commonly
featured in his work. The castle is equipped with a “drawbridge
which can be lowered like an enormous penis to admit visitors,”
Giger explained.
(Many of Giger's paintings also include phalli, most of which are
mechanical, rather than organic.) His castle “is a gigantic Moloch,
which functions by converting living beings into energy. Every
visitor is materially or spiritually exploited.”
In
describing the castle, Giger could be describing almost any of his
own paintings:
Whoever enters the
castle stays there for the rest of his life, which in any case can
only last a few seconds. The belly of Harkonnen is a gigantic,
senseless Gothic, empty space in which corpulent beings swing through
the abyss on their suspensors. The thin, plump external skin is
supported from inside by a bone-like structure in the form of
gigantic vertical plates. The egg in the desert, a symbol of
fertility and reclusion—nothing but a fragile, empty sham.
Although
his contributions were not used in the film, the fact that Giger had
“a completely free hand” in designing Harkonnen suggests that, in
developing the castle's designs, he may have used the same ideas and
themes he'd expressed in his other work. If so, in Giger's comments
about the work he did for various movies, we may have an insight into
some of the views the artist sought to express through his own
biomechanical paintings.
Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.
Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.
Batmoble
Art
describes Giger's Batmobile as an “'X'[-]shaped design” that
included “articulated front legs/mandibles, retractable fins, and
Gatling gun emplacements on each of the four pods on the sides of the
vehicle,” noting that Giger's “design also combined side and
forward intake ports with organic spines and a central pod connecting
the four legs.”
The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.
Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular.
According to David Edelstein,
The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.
Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular.
According to David Edelstein,
Alien
remains the key text in the “body horror” subgenre . . . and
Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men
traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and
died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate . . . . This was
truly what David Cronenberg would call “the new flesh,” a
dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and
alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness. [One
might add that the film also dissolves the divide between male and
female, since male characters are impregnated and give birth.]
Another
of Giger's works, the so-called space
jockey, was included to depict the dead alien pilot of a
spaceship that enabled its crew to drop his species' eggs onto a
planet whose life the parasitic hatchlings could then use as their
hosts.
In
designing the alien “facehugger,”
Giger ultimately decided “on a small creature with humanlike
fingers and a long tail.” He may have had its means of locomotion
and its sexuality in mind. The alien assumes this form during “the
second stage” of its “life cycle,” using its eight legs to
“crawl rapidly” and its tail to assist it in “making great
leaps.” Its legs and tail also help the facehugger to “hug” its
victim's face: it grips the host's head with its legs and wraps its
tail around the victim's neck. Once it has done so, the creature
“administers a cynose-based
paralytic,” which causes the victim to lose consciousness and
the ability to move. The creature is also equipped with a tubular
proboscis, which it introduces into its human host's mouth and
esophagus to implant its embryo—reproduction by oral (and nasal),
rather than genital means. It seems that, for Giger and the others
who designed the facehugger, the creature's function determined its
form.
For
Sil,
the female alien in Species,
Giger was
interested in maintaining her beauty while portraying her as deadly.
She would change colors as she transformed into an assassin, and she
would use her barbed tongue to kill her victims:
The
character is to go through four distinct stages of evolution
[Giger explains:] “She's looking for good-looking, healthy men to
breed her race on Earth. If her lover's not healthy, she sees a green
aura around him. When she gets angry she first becomes dark red, then
orange-red hot. Her clothes and hair burn off and on her back there
are these sharp spikes coming out. Her body weapons are like red
glowing steel. Then she cools to transparent carbonized glass and you
see her inside bone construction: veins, body organs and discs.” It
is at this stage when her killing cycle begins and she loses her
transparency.
Giger
also wanted Sil to have a tongue “composed of barbed hooks. Sil
would kiss her lovers, forcing her tongue into the victim's mouth and
down their throats, then yank the insides out.” Instead of using
her proboscis to impregnate men, Sil would use her tongue to
disembowel them. This idea, like the idea of having Sil change
colors, was rejected.
While
it seems that, during collaboration with others, Giger considers
carefully the effects he wants to create, allowing the forms of his
designs to follow the functions of the films' fantastic characters,
it may be that he is guided more by intuition than by intention.
Since nearly all of his paintings and drawings have similar qualities
and express similar themes and emotions, Giger may operate from an
unconscious template in which bondage, masochism, sadism, and the
“intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality” his
Harkonnen castle embodies provide a palette for creating the forms
that allow various characters to accomplish the tasks assigned them
by a particular movie's script.
Indeed, in
creating his own paintings, Giger appears to rely largely on
intuition,
with no preconceived notions about function or purpose, although
current events and fads may, like his own dreams, play a role:
I
just start from one side and go to the other. I paint whatever
comes to my mind. There is no pre-planning. For instance, the ones
that feature penis imagery and grotesque baby heads, I just felt like
doing that. People have said that I look like these babies a little
bit. At the time, 1973, there was a problem with oil and gas—the
energy crisis. You can see burners in some of my paintings. The other
images must also have some reason behind them. Condoms, of course are
very “in” now.
He
has also admitted to having been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's
Necronomicon,
a fictional book of spells and magic,
and
Lovecraft's cosmicism,
the view “that there
is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and
that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of
intergalactic existence.”
Giger,
who died in 2014, left quite a legacy in his works of art, which
include his remarkable, disturbing, and fascinating drawings,
paintings, and sculptures, as well as in his style, which mixes the
fantastic with such concepts as Lovecraft's cosmicism and the
existential angst of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other
existential philosophers. However, his work also suggests a new
approach to horror fiction that could breathe new life into a genre
that has, of late, become predictable and stale.
Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.
Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.
Giger's
art offers a new approach, one in which there is no discovery to be
made, in which education cannot provide answers, in which revelation
is not forthcoming. Every story is a story in progress, so there is
only what is happening now. There is no context, so everything is a
mystery, which means there is no certainty, no security, and, quite
possibly, no safety, and, certainly, no meaning. Characters may act
by reason or faith or out of compassion, guilt, fear, or a desire for
vengeance. They may act blindly. At times, they may triumph, but over
what will remain unknown, and reason, faith, love, or other
motivators may just as easily fail as succeed.
Giger's
worlds are dark, mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, strangely erotic,
meaningless, and compelling. They are worlds in which anything may
happen and the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Such
worlds may be mad. They may be pictures of hell. They are full of
exploitation, violence, existential absurdity, hopelessness,
helplessness, and terror—just like “real life” itself.
Nihilistic worlds, they are devoid of heroes. They are worlds in
which unseen, monstrous managers rule, unseen and unknown, faceless,
nameless, and inhuman.
They
are perfect settings, in other words, for horror fiction, whether
written or performed.