As a Wargo, descended from the Eastern European hinterlands, home of the original Indo-European culture from which all European languages (as well as Sanskrit) derived, I am naturally drawn to the wer- family of words—one of the main word families of that ancient language, with descendents still in the Slavic, Germanic, and Latin tongues. The wer- family (actually a few related word groups having in common this w followed closely or immediately by an r) is the backbone of English, and if English is viewed not just as a tongue but as a philosophy, the wer- words contain its fundamental intuitions about man and his place in the cosmos. I sort of think of the wer- words as the soul of the Old English worldview.

My favorite of this vast and important family, and a good starting point for any tour of the Anglo-Saxon (AS) tongue, is wyrd, the AS word for “fate.” It survives now in the wonderful word weird, thanks partly I suppose to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “weird sisters” in Macbeth were prophetic witches, but they derived mythologically from the three norns, sister-goddesses in Norse mythology who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it: Urd or Wyrd (the “ur-norn” or norn of the past) spun the yarn or thread of a man’s life, Werthandi (the norn of the present) took the measure of this yarn in the present (think “worth”), and Sculd (“should,” the norn of the future) represented that which was yet to pass, the world in which we pay our debts, fulfill our obligations, and die. (Sculd cut the yarn of a man’s life after Werthandi had measured it out.)

Wyrd comes from the AS word weorthan, “to become,” which in turn came from the Indo-European root wer-, meaning to turn or spin (hence the “spinning” of the yarn of our life). Although it is usually translated as “fate” or “destiny,” those Latinate words imply a predetermination that is not present in wyrd. Rather, wyrd, as becoming and as turning, really represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” as well as “what you are turning into” or “what you will have turned into.” There is definitely a sense of a man working (from AS wyrcan, “to do”) with his wyrd to weave his future—working actively with the strands of his past life to make something new of it, to become something else.

Because of its sense of turning, weorthan connotes direction. Our suffix -ward, as in toward, inward, backward, upward, and so, on comes from -weard. (In AS, andweard meant the present, and froweard, the future.) The AS root weardan is derived from a different Indo-European wer- cluster that has to do with watching, seeing, and guarding, but the sense of direction is often there—as in guarding (warding) or looking in a certain direction. From this root we get aware and wary, ward (from weard, keeper) and warden, as well as award and reward and wares (things that are guarded or watched). Rearward, interestingly, originally meant “rear-guard” (not “toward the rear”). (Guard, in itself, is an interesting story—see below.)

The sense of turning or bending in the wer- family of words also creates a cluster of interesting words to do with the pitfalls of emotion and destiny. There is writhe, to twist/turn (AS writhan), which may produce a wreath, or if it is a person, a wraith—a twisted and anguished soul, or even an undead spectre. If you twist something (like a towel or a neck), you wring it. And a ring, AS hring, is like a turning, or wreath, of metal. The state of being tortured or twisted in anger is wrath, or wroth. Worry comes from wyrgan, to strangle. There is also wrangeln, “to wrestle,” from which we get wrangle. And if you are turned aside from the straight and narrow—the riht (“right”)—then you are wrong (wrang). There are a host of other English words that have this ‘bendy, twisty’ connotation: wrinkle, wrench, wrap, warp, and worm (from AS wyrm), to name a few.

Wrecan (“to inflict, or punish”), whence wreak, is related to weorthan, and is the source of the words wretch (which meant an exile or someone punished) and wretched. Some of wrecan’s descendents have a ‘twisted’ or ‘crumpled’ connotation, as though they have been conflated with the descendents of weorthan over the centuries. Words like wreck. There is also wrought, a word that is often confused as a past tense of wreak, but is actually an alternate to worked, past tense of work, from the AS wyrcan, “to do”—which also gives us a wright, a craftsman or producer of something, like a playwright or a cartwright (a maker of carts).

Turning connotes change, so wer- words are to be found in ideas like worth, which meant what something has turned or changed into—which in the realm of commerce means what or how much a thing can be traded or exchanged for, hence our modern, monetary sense of the word—and worthy. There is also stalwart (“steadfast”), which combines –wart with stathol (“foundation”). Note that wort, as in St. John’s Wort, meant plant (whence we get root), and derives from a different Indo-European root, wyrt, but one with obvious resonances in the whole group of wer- words, with their twists and turns and bends, as well as their veerings (veer is also from wer-, but via the French -vert, equivalent of -ward—think words like vertical or introvert). To root (as in rummage or “root around in the dirt”) came from the AS verb wrotan.

There are also a number of wer- words that have somewhat separate genealogies etymologically but are related philosophically.

Importantly, there is write, which is usually considered to derive from writan, which means to cut or mark or scratch, but which could just as easily (to my mind) come from weorthan in the sense that writing is a turning, not only of lines/letters, but also of turning out. You have only to think of the elaborately wrought Lindisfarne Gospels to see writing as something that twists and turns upon itself—something wrought as well as writhed. And there is of course word, which also has slightly different roots etymologically but ‘goes with’ this whole family of things that turn, or which we turn, and which can be written.

My other favorite ‘other’ wer- word is, well, wer, which meant “man.” Wer has its echoes in the Latinate vir (man) and its derivatives virile (manly) and virtue. But the AS wer only survives in two places in modern English. One is the word werewolf (literally “man-wolf”), a verbal echo of a time when the world was full of shape-changers, or things that turned into other things. The other hiding place of the AS wer is all around us: the world. In AS, this was weorold or “age of man” (wer+old or eld, whence elder). The world in this sense was not the spatial world we think of nowadays, but the temporal, finite time during which men walk upon the eorth, before the end of days (the Norse Ragnarok, or the Christian domesdaeg, the day of doom or “judgment”).

This brings us to the gr-words. The spatial sense of the modern English world was expressed by the AS word middangeard, which J.R.R. Tolkien famously translated as “middle earth” but is more literally translated as “middle enclosure.” Geard, whence yard, once meant any enclosed or walled area, ranging from a fort—something guarded—to the whole inhabited world as a kind of vast enclosure. It is related to the AS verb gyrdan, which meant to encircle or surround, and gives us the modern words gird (as in “gird your loins”), girt, and girdle (from AS gyrdel).

Geard/yard assumed diminished, increasingly domestic meaning over the centuries, and now tends just to mean the grounds attached to a house; it is related to the French jardin, whence the modern English garden. Orchard comes from AS orceard, thought to be an alteration of ortgeard or wyrt-geard—an enclosure for cultivating plants. But the old sense of geard as a vast encircled enclosure is also related to the modern English horizon, which comes (via French) from Greek horizein, “to limit/encircle,” from horos, meaning boundary.

Surely horos must be connected with the Greek hora, meaning time (whence we get words like hour, horoscope, etc.). In the same way, geard, the enclosure of the world, must connect to the AS gear, whence year. The seasons, of course, were marked by where the sun fell on the horizon, so a connection between the ideas of the horizon and cyclical time would have been a natural one to make in the geardagum, the “olden days” or days of yore (from AS geara). What about linear time? Perhaps it is a reach, but gearn (“string”), whence yarn, is what the norns spun, measured, and cut, symbolic of a man’s finite life and wyrd.

The word great, meaning large in size, I connect with the horizon too. Because it is the horizon that gives us our sense of scale. Something great is, to me, something that stands tall against the horizon, or that might even rise up from beyond it.

And what about yearning, from AS giernan or gyrnan? To yearn is to long or desire something in a kind of extreme, painful or melancholy way, to regret the loss of something. One yearns for what has, indeed, passed far away, as beyond the horizon, out of one’s geard.

I was trying to explain to E. why I’m obsessed with the Alien films, and the art of H.R. Giger. To someone unobsessed with horror, it must seem silly. So I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Alien, and the meaning of the alien, and why I love those films so much.

The alien is Slavoj Zizek’s favorite symbol of jouissance, the Lacanian notion of pleasure-in-pain that is sort of the secret satanic lifeblood of the world, and which erupts where the world has become wounded through some trauma. Zizek’s approach is good, in principle, but he’s notoriously careless, and what he actually says about the movie suggests he never actually saw it or was drunk when he did. He describes the face-hugger as a “disgusting polyp,” for one thing. Odd word choice. But I do think it is worthwhile to push the joy-in-pain idea. What is the “trauma” that gives rise to the alien? What is its relevance to the “real world” outside the film, especially now, almost three decades later?

The gender politics of the Alien films, especially the first one, are clear enough: Ripley is a career woman. If you remove the terrifying intrusive presence (Zizek’s excellent methodology for interpreting any horror film), you are left, in this case, with a modern workplace of the late 1970s, where women have made their way into the next-to-top-most echelons (as Ripley has) but still find their authority precarious.

The setting of Alien is significant. From the very first shots, the Nostromo is presented as an office, with its corridors, its papers, its little human touches (the glass drinking bird). Kane, the first to awaken from cryosleep, is like the office manager, groggily opening up, putting on the pot of coffee for his coworkers, etc. Dallas is in charge — a jaded but competent and sensitive boss. Ripley is the second in command: a young, cold, ambitious career woman who has risen to upper management and seems to eschew traditional female roles. The men in the film disobey her, call her a bitch, and one (who turns out to be an android) even tries to kill her with a rolled up pornographic magazine.

In the 1970s, women like Ripley began to face tradeoffs between their traditional female roles (reproduction, femininity, beauty) and their new desexualized professional identities where they struggled to have a voice and be heard as equals, to be taken seriously and listened to. Men didn’t really like it. This was the world in which behaviors like “sexual harassment” were coming to be conceived and named as transgressions. We are still very much with and in the legacy of this change, and its repressed underside is every bit as alive and unspeakable.

In other words, no longer acknowledged within the workplace the Nostromo mirrors is the subject of sexual difference. This includes not just overt attraction or romantic behavior between sexes, touching, sexual humor, etc., but also just the noticing/acknowledgment of our different bodies. Men and women notice each other as sex objects, not just as coworkers, even if we are prevented from talking about it openly. What was driven underground with women’s traditionally feminine concerns and roles (such as childbearing, still a notoriously taboo subject in the workplace) was male sexual desire, which used to find expression at work as much as in any other context. A generation of male professionals has now fully internalized a public decorum that does not acknowledge the male sexual gaze, or reserves it for safe (male only) company. (Women half know this and half don’t know it, which is one of the interesting and electric things about offices.)

When the cryosleep cocoons open up at the beginning of Alien, revealing a mostly naked crew rendered equal/desexualized in this technical future, what male viewer is not inspecting the scene for a glimpse of a woman’s breasts — breasts which, we know or suspect, may be bare in this clinical and asexual context? The camera’s strictly neutral view (centrally positioned squarely opposite the empty “place” of a computer control console) is subtly charged with this disavowed desire — the same way that sexual interest in one’s colleagues, and interest in one’s colleagues’ sex, is disavowed in the ostensibly “neutral” context of work.

I think this disavowed desire that charges an ostensibly or overtly neutral office space provides the true “hidden meaning” of the film.

It is not enough to talk about Ripley as a new feminine heroine, a role model for “strong and independent” women in the modern world, and about the alien as a loathsome, hypermasculine (impregnating, oral-phallic) presence. Sure, its head is a giant penis, but it’s not that simple. The alien is an eruption of what is unspeakable (literally unspeakable, because potentially illegal) within the new gender-equal, sex-neutralized workplace: physical desire, sexual embodiment as such, and the truth of sexual attractions/reproductive urges that can now be expressed only under the table, if at all. The alien (whose fascination comes partly from its blindness — a classical symbol of the impartial or neutral Law) gives physical form to what we have all, on both sides of the sexual gap, cut away from ourselves, sacrificed, in pain, for the sake of the new capitalist order.

Thus the reading that only sees Ripley as a hero and the alien as the enemy is blind to this sexual gap and to the male gaze altogether, which retains a wish to regard the female center of this film as an object of sexual desire — a gaze that, in this film, finds itself perpetually thwarted/obscured (just as Ripley’s voice is, throughout the film, not heard by her male colleagues — the film’s logline, don’t forget, was “In space, no one can hear you scream”). Among many other things, the alien represents the potential fulfillment of such a wish. And insofar as women in this new world have “given up their femininity,” they too have lost something; Ripley, alone with her cat in the shuttle at the end, represents a terrifying possibility for the desexualized career woman as much as a victory blow for her independence. I suspect that, besides obviously being a fearful antagonist, the alien is as much an object of female repressed (sexual and maternal) desire to be “treated like a woman” in the old fashioned way. Isn’t it only the alien, of all the characters in the film, who can be said to treat us like a woman?

The alien is terrifying, but we want to see it, because it is so incredibly beautiful. The intense, almost unspeakable beauty of H.R. Giger’s creation is what is so hard to notice behind the veil of genre (horror) that is drawn over the film. We turn our eyes away from gore as such, from the insides of the body revealed, and from the chest-burster rising from the bloody pool of Kane’s chest. But afterward we yearn to see what this “star child” has become, what it has grown into, how it has turned out, and the film never quite satisfies us. In a way (though it is also partly an effect of the time when the film was made, before CGI, when monsters weren’t all that scary-looking because they were just men in suits), the beauty of the alien “hides” behind the horror-film truism that what you can’t see is more frightening than what you can see. But our longing to see the full-grown alien, to drink in its gorgeous form, is as nonobvious, and as difficult to admit perhaps, as the male longing to see some breasts in the cryosleep room at the beginning of the film (or perhaps an even more intimate glimpse in the shuttle closet at the end). I can’t speak for ‘the female gaze’ but is it any different? Does it not thrill to the beauty of the xenomorph in its disavowed nostalgia for (a bit of good old) ‘sexual harassment’?

The term “jouissance” is pretentious and vague. I submit that the alien is simply sex, in all its tacit dimensions that we, after feminism, have lost the will and the capacity and the freedom to acknowledge. It is the difference and vibrancy (and danger) that was drained from the gender-egalitarian workplace for it to function as a place of work. The alien is what has fled into the cooling ducts, biding its time, as we men and women sit at our computer consoles, in our neutralized offices, pretending for eight or nine hours each day that our differences aren’t the most exciting thing in the world.