Why are aliens minimalist?

and what does that say about us?

In Phillip Ridley’s play, Tender Napalm, Man describes to his lover a fantasy/nightmare in which he’s abducted into an alien spaceship. He describes the room he finds himself in:

Bright light above… Cool and hard beneath… Like marble… A gentle drone. Like the hum of a fridge… I’m in a vast room. A white, glowing room. The light seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Ridley’s character imagines a spaceship with a minimalist aesthetic: bright, white, empty, vast. There are no tchotchkes, no accoutrement. There’s certainly no gallery wall. The alien that Man meets on this imagined spaceship fits into the minimalist aesthetic:

It’s… it’s about the size of a seven-year-old child. Its skin is pale. The creature’s eyes are huge and jet black — No! A hint of blue. Like two aubergines. The alien — it has no nose… no ears… no hair… no belly button… no genitals… It’s got a mouth, but it’s tiny and… no lips… It has three fingers on each hand.

The body of the alien reflects the minimalism of the space; the main features of this alien lie in what it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a nose, ears, hair, a belly button, or genitals. It barely has anything, except for its huge, dark, abysses called eyes.

This is what we expect of aliens, right? When we talk about aliens, for the most part, we talk about slick, smooth creatures that live in slick, smooth, hovering aircrafts. If you want to draw a picture of an alien that will be swiftly recognized as an alien, you draw the cone-shaped head, the two big eyes, and little else.

There’s a preponderance of this kind of alien, known as the “grey alien archetype”, in the art we create. There’s the kind, inquisitive E.T., the gargantuan, barely visible, god-like, peacekeeping Abbott and Costello in Arrival, the imagined warlord-explorers in Tender Napalm, and many more. There’s even the satire of this very trope in Scary Movie 3 (unironically one of my favorite movies of all time)!

The grey alien is, across the variations, an exceptional communicator.

In Tender Napalm, the alien Man describes communicates with him telepathically — at first, Man hears his “gurgling and squeaking,” and then begins to hear those sounds, converted into words, inside his own head. In Beautyland (one of my top book recos of this year!), author Marie-Helene Bertino describes an alien culture that communicates all knowledge and emotionality through sheer proximity; they need only stand near each other to understand one another. The language of the aliens in Arrival literally defies chronological time; being able to speak and understand it equates to experiencing the past, present and future simultaneously.

(I think part of why E.T. is so endearing is because he undermines this key quality of the grey alien — he’s an alien, but he’s also kind of just a guy. He drinks beer and watches TV and needs help getting home. He’s just like us! But still, E.T. possesses the gift of communication — he may only say a few words, but he knows which ones to say. You’re thinking those words right now, after all, aren’t you!)

When we think about the grey alien, we think about beings gifted with pure communication. And with transcendent communication comes transcendent knowledge; if one grey alien knows something, all grey aliens know it. With infinite, collective knowledge comes peace. The grey aliens have it all, really.

But also, they have nothing, or perhaps more accurately, no things. The grey alien has transcended any physical manifestation of culture. There are no books, no paintings, no trinkets. Why read or write a book when all knowledge is already shared? Why paint an emotion when you already experience all emotions, and so does everyone else? Why collect trinkets when you exist in the past, present, and future simultaneously?

The grey alien doesn’t need all that. The grey alien doesn’t need any of that! The grey alien doesn’t need markers of expression, photographs of the past, furniture, books, flags. The grey alien has all the things those things grasp at inside its bulbous head.

It does sound nice, I admit. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the things we grasp at? Time might not feel so scary if we understood all things. Death itself might feel like a minor event. Pain, conflict, war caused by an inability to understand each other? Not a problem anymore.

The grey alien’s minimalism suggests that manifestations of culture are a stopgap, entities we crave only because we lack enlightenment. If we had universal empathy, understanding, and knowledge, we wouldn’t need translation, books, trinkets, scrapbooks, statues, pieces of paper. We wouldn’t need anything except each other.

But we don’t have universal empathy, understanding, and knowledge. No, we misunderstand each other. We mistreat each other. We don’t know things. We fumble our words. We fear death. We grieve.

We try to tell each other how things feel. We try to share knowledge. We try to unshackle ourselves from the limits of time and space. We try to stay alive. We try to comfort, to delight, to please, to collectivize.

In trying, we create the things the grey alien does not have. To try to tell someone how something feels, we tell stories. To share stories across time and space, we write them down. To capture and convey how things look, we make paintings and take photographs. To stave off loneliness, we make bowls, plates, utensils, tables, chairs, rugs so that we may eat together. To feel like a person who died is still alive, we keep some of their things, a jacket they wore, a toy they played with, a blanket they snuggled. We talk about them. We make ceramic statues of things they loved, and we pass those statues onto other people. We sew the blanket into something else.

I love our attempts. our things. I love the books we write. I love the trinkets we save. I love the moment when a thing becomes an artifact. These things and those moments feel sacred to me! They all matter, or mattered, so much to someone. They were an attempt to communicate, to understand, to cheat death, to carry on. They were an attempt to transcend the limits that make us not grey aliens, that make us human.

We try so hard to transcend our humanity. I think of Faust, exchanging his soul for all knowledge of everything. I remember Faust is a character in a story; I think of Faust being written, just as Tender Napalm was written, just as Scary Movie 3 was written.

We create aliens that can do the things we can’t. But we take from them the warmth of the things we create. We give them enlightenment; we deny them generative art.

I love a life full of things. I love to cover the walls with art. I read all the time; I’m so hungry to understand what everyone’s trying to say. I’m so hungry to learn about your sacred objects. Each person is a museum of pain they’ve endured, lessons they’ve learned, ways they’ve tried to keep going. And I’d like to take a tour in every one.

We try to transcend our humanity. We fail. In doing so, we create gifts for each other.