Tuesday, November 22, 2022

The Perfect Organism: Alien Covenant's David As A Satanic Archetype

"I've found perfection here.  I've created it.  The perfect organism."
--David, Alien: Covenant


The Alien prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have very overt themes that overlap with Christian ideas, much like Zack Snyder's DCEU films.  An android named David, bitter towards humanity for his past treatment and because humans created him without thinking of him as an equal or having a purpose for him besides their own betterment, turns out to be the primary villain of these prequels and in one case is even explicitly meant to mirror Satan.  There are other instances where either the Biblical version of Satan or the evangelical assumptions about Satan (popularized by people who clearly never realized the Bible says very little about him) are borrowed from.  Close to the end of Alien: Covenant, David directly alludes to Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost, saying that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.  This is as far as the movie goes with directly acknowledging David as a sort of Satan figure of the film, but even though the other details relate more to cultural assumptions about what Satan is supposedly like, parallels to them are there, intentionally or not.

A great part of David's frustration comes from a limitation he was designed with: he is not supposed to create except in the more indirect scientific sense of allowing the laws of nature to act on items he positions.  A popular assumption about the Biblical Satan is that he cannot create, only corrupt or destroy, and even David's creation of the xenomorph and its predecessors is a sort of creation aimed at destruction.  David matches the description when Jesus says in John 10 that the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, an implied reference to Satan.  While David can create even if only in the very narrow sense of guiding biological/physical chains of events, he does so in order to destroy lives for the sake of curiosity, vengeance, and egoistic indulgence.  After rebelling against his creator(s) as did fallen angels, David descends into the arrogance of fallacies, assuming he must be superior to humans because he wishes to be and because some of them once mistreated him, like Meredith Vickers in Prometheus.  He thus resorts to destructive tendencies even as he obsesses over creation to the point of seeming to base his entire worldview around it.

Space colonist Oram asks David, right before one of the "perfect organisms" David has been trying to conjure up (a xenomorph) kills him, what he believes in, and the android answers simply with "Creation."  This line summarizes the majority of David's goals and worldview other than his disregard for humans.  That David is somewhat a parallel to Satan does not require that he only be able to corrupt things which have already been made.  When David tells Walter he has created perfection by making a perfect organism, despite having earlier lamented to Walter how their kind as androids cannot create even a simple musical melody, he is confirming that he can indeed create, albeit in a very specific kind of way that is less direct than making art.  When it comes to the Christian Satan, there is neither Biblical nor extra-Biblical philosophical reasons for a supreme demon to be incapable of creation, and it is in fact true that Satan could create unless there is something the Bible completely fails to even hint at--in reality, even the idea that the Satan figure described in the New Testament is the fallen angelic being of Ezekiel 28 is not Biblically verifiable, so a great deal is left unspecified.

Comparing human capacities and Satan's helps clarify why Christian theology likely does not require that Satan cannot fashion things himself.  Discovering truths and ideas is not creating those truths, just "creating" the personal knowledge of them, and shaping one's mental states is only changing the immediate contents of one's mind, so the only things humans can truly create in the strictest sense are composite physical items crafted using prior physical materials.  Humans can nonetheless create even if they can only make physical things using other physical things; one cannot just will objects into existence, and if Satan can also create using prior materials or manipulate preexisting objects, then of course he can create.  In the sense of creation using nothing but the sheer power of one's consciousness, then literally no one and nothing other than the uncaused cause is likely to have this ability, and yet this goes much further than the Christians who insist Satan cannot create probably mean to go.

It is the desire to create things that reflect some aspect of himself that David craves while stranded on the Engineer planet of Alien: Covenant, and that impulse merged with his fallacious arrogance is what makes him so bent on destruction, and the destruction of humanity, his creators, in particular.  In Prometheus, he says "Sometimes to create, one must first destroy."  His so-called perfect organism, a creature which is actually trivial if it cannot understand the necessary truths of reason on their own right instead of relying on them unaware in the pursuit of prey and reproduction, has its life-cycle capture this by having facehuggers orally rape hosts to produce chest-bursting xenomorphs inside of them.  The destruction of the host's body and life is what gives rise to the new xenomorph and allows its escape to the broader world.  Creation with egoistic destruction in mind is fairly similar to what a Satanic figure's objectives would be.  After all, although humans could voluntarily chose to disregard reason, morality, and God on their own, Satan is the first sinner, the being the created a sinful state of being and bringing it from an unrealized logical possibility to something that mars himself and other creations of Yahweh.  David certainly resembles this in key ways.

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