Terrific Cakes: Alien - The Cake is a Goddamn Robot

Jump to the cake!

A Favorite Movie

Favorite movies are like best friends: they’re more of a tier than a specific entry.

Alien is often in contention for my favorite movie. Not favorite horror movie. Favorite movie.

I don’t think I even thought of Alien as a horror movie until I was in college and showed it to a few friends who had never seen it before. Their absolute terror at watching Sigourney and friends fight to understand, isolate, destroy, and finally just try to escape the xenomorph shifted my perception of Alien. Like most of the horror I was exposed to as a child, my relationship to this foundational movie keeps shifting as my own experiences in life tear away ever newer, ever more devastating depths of despair.

Yay!

Aliens vs. Alien

A big reason I didn’t think of Alien as a horror movie was because, for most of my adolescence and childhood, I preferred James Cameron’s action classic Aliens.

Aliens is why I think I may have seen these movies very very young. I remember seeing Jurassic Park when it came out (I was nine). I remember watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (I was five) and Star Wars when I was even younger (mostly because it was on a VHS recorded from TV that also had The Great Muppet Caper on it). The idea that Aliens would have been kept out of this rotation seems dissonant with being raised on television in the late 80’s with two older sisters and parents who are pop culture enthusiasts.

It feels almost silly, now, to say which of the two entries in the franchise I prefer as they’re very different approaches to movie-making. I love the slow burn and dawning terror of Alien. The characters absolutely don’t know what’s coming their way and they are completely unprepared for the escalation of violence they’re doomed to encounter. Contrastingly, Aliens has a huge cast of memorable badasses whose hubristic downfall is punctuated by genuinely sincere moments amidst a chaotic and frenetic battle for survival. Both great. Both totally different stories.

A haunted house vs. a battle royale.

A Haunted HOuse?

You heard me.

I forget the first time I heard Alien referred to as a “gothic horror,” but when I heard this it was like a veil being lifted from my eyes. Alien’s incredible sci-fi design absolutely blinded me to its structure as a classic haunted house tale.

When you think about a haunted house story, there are a few elements that are pretty set-in-stone:

Atmosphere of fear (“In space, no one can hear you scream...”)
Characters encountering elements, like a ruined building, that hint at a violent past (the distress beacon and dead alien ship)
Claustrophobic atmosphere (have you seen this movie’s tight tight corridors in an otherwise HUGE ship?)
A house, town, or community the characters either can’t or won’t leave (space!)
Discovered manuscripts or hidden passages as a framing device/exposition (Mother and Ash)

It’s not a perfect comparison, especially since Alien doesn’t lend any supernatural power to its monster, but one of the reasons Alien hits so hard is because it’s doing what sci-fi does best: taking familiar narrative beats and exaggerating them through a suspension of reality.

The Real Terror of Alien

It’s not the alien!

I wonder if anyone reading this has not seen Alien, but if it’s been a while, I really recommend you STOP READING RIGHT NOW AND GO WATCH IT.

There.

Seen it?

Remember it?

Were you shocked to remember the horrific, violent scene with Ash? Did you find yourself stopping the movie as Ripley confronted him and just say to yourself, “Sigourney… you did not have to go this hard at this movie, but I’m so glad you did.”

Don’t get me wrong, the xenomorph is one of the best designed monsters in… human history? Just looking at its eight feet of slimy, sharp, skeletal anatomy is terrifying enough, but the knowledge that its parasitic genesis is birthed through a skittering vaginal spider with too many fingers violently penetrating someone’s face cranks the terror beyond conscious and into animal. The sexual violence H.R. Giger’s design promises resonates with the viewer on an instinctual level. It disgusts and intrigues. It’s familiar and wrong. Oh, and then for fun it has acid for blood.

But despite this terrifying killing machine, the xenomorph is a red herring for the real villain and terror of Alien: the company.

That’s right: even in the future the board room can’t hear you scream about OSHA violations.

The company Ripley and the victims of the Nostromo work for sent them to find the xenomorph, be infected by it, and die. The company Ripley and her crewmembers dedicated years of their lives to on this long-haul mining operation, the company that sent them away from their families decided their lives were worth less than the potential the xenomorph offers.

It’s a shocking revelation in the film, but the reason it hits so hard as an audience member is because the only reaction most viewers probably have to the reveal that their employer is selling their lives for profit is, “Ugh, of course.”

We’re not special. We’re not more valuable than any other cog. We are in a capitalist society and this means not only that we are all replaceable, but that we have all been assessed a certain value by the places we work. Every day our employers measure our worth against their other options and determine whether we remain.

The idea of a company throwing away our lives for a few more cents on the dollar, or even the potential for a few more cents, is something we live with every day. Companies make us forget about it with little perks, glowing performance reviews, and saying thing like, “We’re a family,” or “We’d never sell the company.” But I was in executive meetings and board meetings for about ten years as a sales and marketing executive. As much as any individual unit or team or manager might need to believe their company cares, the people we work for absolutely consider our lives forfeit to their own prosperity. If it makes you feel any better, the people who sell their companies and get rich at our expense are themselves at the behest of someone else. Your manager will sacrifice you because they are terrified they’ll be fired by their director who is at the mercy of their VP who can be axed without notice by the CEO who can be ousted because they didn’t take a board member out to dinner when they took a trip to Chicago. And the board member only gets to stay so long as they keep funneling their own (or their friends’) money into the company. It’s a predatory food chain with no one coming out unscarred or with clean hands. Everyone is vulnerable so they Burke their way through their careers.

When Alien shows that its horrifyingly unique, never-before-seen body horror of claws and big-mouth-with-littler-mouth-inside is actually just the tool of the everyday mundane horror of corporate greed?

Gut punch. Well, gut burst.

I don’t think about Alien in my everyday life. (It’s not like It where I walk around sewer grates.) I don’t turn on lights in the night and expect to see a xenomorph jump out at me. (It’s not like Jaws where I constantly see shadows in the ocean.) But I do wear a locket with Ellen Ripley and Katharine Parker in it. My locket is a daily reminder of the kind of everyday horror we so easily subject ourselves to: our simultaneous greed and dehumanization. We convince ourselves we will be rewarded for our effort and sacrifice, and perhaps in the micro we are, but we are also constantly in threat of being thrown into the scrap pile for the marginal advancement of capitalist hierarchies.

(I guess I’ll highlight here that I don’t think capitalism is the worst. I actually really like the American idea of working hard and being rewarded for it. It was a system that I absolutely benefitted from… until I didn’t. But OH MY GOD CAN WE PLEASE GET SOME PROTECTIONS AS EMPLOYEES?!?! FUCK “AT WILL” EMPLOYMENT FOR SALARIED POSITIONS. FUCK PTO AND SICK DAYS BEING THE SAME THING. FUCK BEING PUNISHED BECAUSE YOU GET ALL YOUR WORK DONE FROM NINE-TO-FIVE SO YOU’RE NOT “GOING THE EXTRA MILE.” FUCK FUCK FUCK BOY’S CLUBS. FUCK “EXCELLING UNDER PRESSURE IN A FAST-PACED WORK ENVIRONMENT.” AND FINALLY, FUCK CONSTANTLY SACRIFICING EMPLOYEES’ TIME AND HEALTH FOR DECIMALS OF PROFIT THAT THEY’LL NEVER SEE ANY BENEFIT FROM. “Congrats on your highest sales year ever! You exceeded all goals! But unfortunately our profit was only 5% and the board needs 9%, so there won’t be any raises this year.” FUCK YOU. [Also in this totally theoretical example, that 5% represented more profit in terms of dollars, so the board realized more literal dollars of profit, but because it didn’t meet the percentage they pulled out of thin air without consulting anyone in sales, theoretically someone like me had to go tell my team that they didn’t get raises despite blowing their goals out of the water.])

Alien is a haunted house story in which the monster killing them is corporate greed. Its truth is buried beneath spaceship thrusters and slime and skittering legs and acid baths and chest-bursting screams and smoke and thousands of flashing lights, but it’s there, resonating with the audience and reminding us to blast straight to the heart of our real villains.

The Cake is a Goddamn Robot!

In addition to hiding its real villain amidst mountains of viscera, Alien also takes part in my favorite trope of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror: rules!

Specifically, Alien takes a long time to establish the rules of its world. Great speculative fiction plays on the assumptions of its audience. Any horror movie made in the last thirty years knows that the audience has seen a horror movie. It’s one of the reasons Scream is so powerful. Scream is a populated by characters that know the trappings of horror movies, and yet their knowledge doesn’t protect them from falling into those same traps.

In bad speculative fiction, these rules come as late in the story exposition to solve plot problems. For example, in Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin made the white walkers so incredibly powerful and omnipotent that he wrote himself into a corner. This is why most zombies movie usually end in an apocalypse. In (I think) the second-to-last season of Game of Thrones, a group of protagonists kill a white walker and watch all of its revived followers drop dead (except one for plot reasons). Boom. Sire rules are in effect. (Sire rules are a trope of vampire and werewolf stories in which killing the original vampire or werewolf either kills all subsequent monsters or restores the humanity of all their offspring.) In the first 2,000 or so pages of the story and 10,000 or so hours of the TV show, sire rules had never even been hinted at in Westeros. As the show was approaching its end, this brand new rule was introduced to the story to fix a narrative problem… and it was infuriating to behold.

Contrastingly, Alien makes spectacular use of establishing rules with the character of Ash. Ripley doesn’t trust Ash from the jump. Captain Dallas tells Ripley that Ash was a late replacement to the crew and that he has absolute authority over anything medical. Ripley’s confused and frustrated because Ash behaves in ways that endanger not only the crew, but himself as well. While all of this is happening, the audience is constantly seeing technology that appears almost near-future. Although they are in space, the spaceship is a dingey, off-colored, analog version of space travel. It’s not slick. It’s not sophisticated. Even the operating system of the computer, Mother, speaks in a stilted synthetic voice. In no way does Alien suggest sophisticated androids are something that exist in this world.

But it doesn’t say they don’t, either.

That’s the trick. The audience looks at Ash and reads him as human even though his behavior is so distinctly different than the rest of the crew. The existence of the Nostromo suggests a significantly more advanced technological society than ours, but cheap blinking lights and long haul trucker-esque clothes tell us they’re still as far way from androids as we were in 1979.

When Ash is revealed as a heartless robot in thrall to the company’s demands, his behavior from the beginning of the film clicks into place. The hints and concerns of Ripley and Dallas suddenly make more sense and as shocking as it is, it doesn’t feel wrong. As an audience member, it feels honest to the story and absolutely SHOCKING as a contradiction to what we thought we knew.

It obviously had to be a cake.

Noodle pudding in cake is going to become a thing.

Milky Sweaty Noodley

Milk Sweat

The first thought I had with this cake was Ash’s milky sweat. It’s the first indication that he’s not what we think he is, and after the slow drip of white liquid from his scalp, things escalate FAST.

I knew I could accomplish the milk sweat with icing, but what other flavors to use?

Sometimes when I’m trying to think of a flavor combination I just start saying an ingredient out loud. It was during movie club with Shannon that we came up with the flavor, basically by saying… “Milk… milk… milk sweat… milk and honey… honey… honey with lemon… lemon tea… tea with milk… milk… milk tea…? Boba? Milk and tea with honey? Tea cakes? Milk Tea Cake!”

It’s like watching Monet at work, I know.

Noodles on Noodles

The second thing I think about with Ash is his noodley, gurgling resurrection.

The practical effects of Ash’s head on the table next to his spurting milk body are so simple and so great. I’m not sure what kind of industrial tubing they used, but it reminded me of noodles so I found a recipe for a sweet vermicelli cake called Vamazelli.

Their are a few different sweet pasta based desserts, but often they come to the consistency of rice pudding. I knew I wanted the noodles to be their own layer, so I needed something that set pretty firmly. In hindsight, I probably could have done something that spilled out like viscera when sliced…

Spilled entrails as cake you say… hmm… an idea for the future if ever I heard one.

Fondant Exterior

To get the effect of milk sweat over cracking skin I thought I’d try fondant. I made it myself. It was moist and fresh.

It still sucked a little. Too sweet. Kind of dry after a day or so.

Fondant really just is no good for anything but looking crisp.

I would just use frosting next time.

Video Vixen

I made this cake over two days and the whole time I kept thinking “Why don’t I do this every time?!”

It was so much easier to make this many different elements over the course of two days than try and cram it all into one day.

Often by the time I’m getting to the decorating portion of my cakes I’m exhausted and ready to throw my hands up and say “it’s good enough!” I think pushing myself to always make any layer cake over the course of two days will be a huge improvement in not only the finished product, but my sanity.

Also, cake almost always taste better the second day.

Recipe CARDS

(Right click to save the images and print them out!)

Thanks for your eyes! Follow and share on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube! I put out a video and post every few weeks, and subscribing is the best way to make sure you don’t miss any of the absurdity.

Join me next time as I watch one of the horniest, oft-referenced, raw hamburgeriest movies ever: The Fly!

There was no need for Gina Davis to come so hard at this, but I’ll always love her for it.