Analysis of ‘Dark Star’

Dark Star is a 1974 sci-fi comedy produced, scored, and directed by John Carpenter, his feature directorial debut. It was written by him and Dan O’Bannon, who also acts in the film, does the voices for Bombs #19 and #20, edited the film, and created many of the special effects.

Other actors in the film are Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Andreijah “Dre” Pahich, and Joe Saunders. Carpenter did the voices of Talby (Pahich) and Commander Powell (Saunders). Barbara “Cookie” Knapp, the only female in the cast, did the voice of the computer. Miles Watkins is Mission Control, and Nick Castle is the alien.

Dark Star started out as a student film while Carpenter and O’Bannon were at the University of Southern California. It was originally a 45-minute film with a budget of $6000. The first version of the film was completed in 1972. With $10,000 in financial support from Jonathan Kaplan, Carpenter and O’Bannon were able to shoot an extra fifty minutes in 1973, thus making Dark Star feature-length.

The film was well-received at Filmex, but not on its initial theatrical release, with nearly empty theatres and little reaction to the intended humour. O’Bannon would later lament that they had “what would have been the world’s most impressive student film and it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Nonetheless, by the early 1980s, Dark Star became a cult film among sci-fi fans, and Quentin Tarantino called it a “masterpiece.” O’Bannon reworked the ‘beachball alien’ section of the film into 1979’s Alien. He reasoned, “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream.” George Lucas was impressed with O’Bannon’s special effects, remarkable for such a low-budget film, such as the spaceship jumping into hyperspace and the computer screen effects, so he hired O’Bannon to apply these effects to Star Wars (1977).

The humor of Dark Star was meant to parody 2001: a Space Odyssey. While 2001 is an epic film with profound meditations on the progress of man and his place in the universe, Dark Star is a short, absurdist look at how not only insignificant and bumbling we are, but also how potentially harmful we are to the universe and to ourselves. Instead of such powerful, grandiose music as Richard Strauss‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Dark Star we hear a trite country song (“Benson, Arizona”) during the opening and ending credits, as well as “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini‘s Barber of Seville, and Carpenter’s use of a modular synthesizer.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.

The film begins with a video message sent from Earth to the spaceship named Dark Star, manned by a crew of four men–Lt. Doolittle (Narelle), Sgt. Pinback (O’Bannon), Boiler (Kuniholm), and Talby (Pahich), while a fifth man, Commander Powell (Saunders), has been cryogenically suspended after a fatal electrocution from his malfunctioning chair–whose mission is to seek out and destroy unstable planets that will threaten Earth’s hopes to colonize space.

The video message is sent from Mission Control, from McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The man from Earth (Watkins, having the same surname as the actor) expresses condolences over the death of Powell, and informs the crew that their request for radiation shielding has been denied. Cutbacks in Congress have made it impossible to help the crew with the ship’s increasing technical issues: malfunctions, radiation leaks, failing life support and communication systems, the loss of the crew’s entire supply of toilet paper, etc. In spite of this refusal to help, Watkins puts on an encouraging smile and speaks of having every confidence in the crew to solve their problems themselves…as if that were sufficient compensation for having left them all in the lurch.

I see this sci-fi story as an allegory for late imperialism, in which the continuing drive to colonize, extract natural resources, wage endless wars to maintain global dominance, and maximize profit are not only increasing suffering worldwide, but are also harming the imperial core in such forms as rising neofascism, worsening economic crises, and destruction of the environment. The worsening breakdowns and malfunctions of the spaceship, which is used to destroy unstable planets for the sake of facilitating the colonization of space, can be seen to symbolize our end-of-times predicament today.

In this sense, as absurd as the story of Dark Star may be, it can also be seen as prophetic of our growing problems in the twenty-first century, and therefore it’s a warning to us all.

We next see shots of the spaceship approaching a planet the crew is about to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer is providing some dark, eerie music, which is fitting (in spite of how this film is supposed to be a comedy), given the settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory I’ve discussed.

Doolittle at first is having difficulty contacting Talby, who’s up at the top of the ship looking out at the stars, and there are technical problems with the communications system; the intercom won’t send Talby a clear transmission from Doolittle. As well as further establishing the extent of the technical issues of the spaceship, this problem also represents the sense of mutual alienation of the crew.

Once communication with Talby is established, him needing to give the other three a diameter approximation of the planet, they get ready to blow it up. Bomb #19 (which, like the ship’s other bombs, has AI, allowing it to think and speak, as well as making the bombs a parody of HAL 9000) is lowered out of the bomb bay. Pinback does a countdown, then drops the bomb, and the crew gets ready to put the ship into hyperdrive to clear away from the explosion.

It is here where, not only do we get a bit of a parody of 2001‘s “Stargate” sequence, but also a taste of O’Bannon’s special effect for seeing the stars fly at us, as they more famously do before the Millennium Falcon when it goes into hyperspace. Now Dark Star never directly inspired the Death Star, which as we know is also meant to destroy planets for the Galactic Empire, but a comparison of the spaceship here with the battle station of Star Wars makes it extremely tempting to imagine Lucas, who as I said above hired O’Bannon, being at least unconsciously inspired by Dark Star to create the Death Star. Certainly some have noted the shape of the ship as similar to the, however much larger, Star Destroyers. In any case, inspired or not, these comparisons reinforce my settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory of Dark Star.

Connected with my allegory is a discussion among the crew of where to go next to find an unstable planet to blow up, now that the current one has been successfully destroyed. Boiler mentions a 95% probability of intelligent life in the Horsehead Nebula sector, but Doolittle has no interest in that “bull” at all since the last time they found intelligent life, it was the reddish ‘beachball’ with two clawed feet that Pinback has taken onboard.

Doolittle’s dismissive contempt of alien life, as well as Pinback’s–let’s face it–abduction and kidnapping of the alien, demonstrates the crew’s racist and imperialist mindset. Remember–they’re space colonizers. Doolittle calls the alien “a damn mindless vegetable…looked like a limp balloon.” This attitude is allegorical of that of British colonizers taking the land away from indigenous people around the world. In spite of the comical spectacle of the film, Dark Star has a dark message.

Doolittle doesn’t care about intelligent life: he just wants to blow planets up. This mentality, in principle, is no different from colonizers like Columbus, who took over land and killed the aboriginals. Doolittle is similarly contemptuous towards Pinback, demonstrating again the mutual alienation among the crew, and also how imperialist/colonialist disregard for aboriginals can spill over into disregard for those of one’s own nation or ethnic group. Alienation is catching.

Boiler finds an 85% probability of an unstable planet in the Veil Nebula; it will probably go off its orbit and hit a star, so the Veil Nebula is the next destination for Dark Star. As they begin their journey there, Boiler puts on some music, “Benson, Arizona,” the country music theme song heard during the credits.

The song’s lyric essentially expresses the homesickness felt by the crew as they sail across the stars. The film’s setting is the mid-twenty-second century, and while the crew have aged only three years, they’ve been out in space for twenty Earth years. One issue the crew has to deal with, therefore, is how being cramped in this small spaceship for so long has been driving them crazy. Their mutual alienation, as well as the continuing deterioration of the ship, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The long, shaggy hair and beards of the crew made Tarantino think of hippies back when he first saw (and initially hated) Dark Star as a kid. That shaggy hairiness, combined with the crew’s indulging in various forms of tomfoolery to relieve their boredom (i.e., Pinback’s practical jokes, Boiler playing the knife game with a switchblade and firing a laser rifle, etc.), reminds me of the Swampmen in MASH. Hippies are supposed to be antiwar liberals, as were Hawkeye et al in the TV show; as we’ve learned over the past fifty years, though, the vicissitudes of time can make liberals bang the war drums as much as conservatives do.

After Doolittle does a video recording for the ship’s log, discussing such things as the deterioration of the ship and the ETA in the Veil Nebula, we see Dark Star going through space while the crew is rocking out to some 1960s blues-based guitar music. Then the ship’s computer, with the female voice, interrupts the men’s fun to warn them of a collision course they are on with an asteroid storm, which once they have gone through it, the technical problems of the ship will of course be even worse.

It’s interesting at this point to compare this film with another of Carpenter’s–The Thing. Both have an all-male cast who are isolated and have an alien among them that is hostile in intent. And just as Dark Star has a computer with a female voice, so does The Thing, the chess computer voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, which plays a game with RJ MacReady (played by Kurt Russell) at the beginning of the movie.

As I said in my analysis of The Thing, we can see a paradoxical merging of negative attitudes towards both women and men in Dark Star. Note how, on the one hand, there’s the lack of women on the ship (a computer’s voice is the only ‘female’ reality for the crew–it’s just an abstraction for the men) as well as the nudie centrefolds on the walls (the exposure of their anatomy removed for the sake of getting a more marketable G rating); yet on the other hand, the bumbling incompetence of the male crew, as well as their lack of mutual empathy, makes them hardly any superior to women.

The asteroid storm seems to be bound by an electromagnetic energy vortex, like one the crew encountered two years before. Presumably, the damage that that one caused to the ship hasn’t been adequately dealt with (i.e., the computer’s defensive circuits, which were destroyed in that other storm).

As the ship is going through the asteroid storm, we see a pinkish glow around it, representing some kind of defensive shield. Still, this isn’t good enough to prevent any damage, for the electromagnetic energy zaps the back of the ship, causing the bomb bay system to be activated. Bomb #20 is let out, programmed and ready to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer plays triplets of a chromatic ascension of two minor seconds over a tonic note, going up and changing key each time by a half step and adding to the tension of the moment.

Next, the computer tells Bomb #20 to return to the bomb bay. The AI system in the bombs all have a male voice, in contrast to the female voice of the computer. What’s interesting to note in this contrast also is the rationality of the computer as against the irrational stubbornness of the bomb, which insists that it ought to blow up simply because such is its programming, in spite of the fact that it received no command from the crew and left the bomb bay only because of a malfunction caused by the asteroid storm. Only after repeated arguing with the computer does the bomb return, saying, “Very well” in a slightly petulant tone.

The ship finally gets out of the asteroid storm. After Boiler’s and Pinback’s engaging, in their sleeping area, in a bit of the tomfoolery I described above, Doolittle leaves and goes into a dark room in which he has an odd keyboard instrument constructed of such things as glass water bottles and cans to produce tones. He plays it, though out of tempo. The music is presumably from Carpenter’s synthesizer, but it sounds a bit like a prepared piano.

All of these goings-on have to do with the crew trying to alleviate the boredom they feel between tense moments like the asteroid storms, as I mentioned above. After finishing his keyboard practice, Doolittle goes up to the top of the ship to give Talby some breakfast and to chat with him. The top has a transparent dome through which Talby likes to look out at the stars. Doolittle discusses his old surfing days back in Malibu, and how he wishes he had his surfboard with him so he could wax it.

Talby has isolated himself up in this domed area ever since Powell died. Doolittle worries that Talby spends too much time up here, and not enough time with the others. Talby thinks of encountering the Phoenix asteroids when the ship reaches the Veil Nebula; these circle the universe once every 12.3 trillion years, and Talby understands that they “glow with all the colours of the rainbow.” He’d love to see them.

We’ll come back to a fulfillment…of sorts…of these two men’s wishes by the end of the film.

Meanwhile, down below, Boiler wants to do a little target practice with the laser rifle by firing it at a metal square he’s placed in front of a door. Pinback tries to stop him.

Then, the computer tells Pinback that he has to feed the alien. He’s annoyed at having to do so…well, maybe he shouldn’t have taken it on board, then.

The following sequence was meant to be funny in a slapstick sort of way. Instead, I see an allegorical commentary on how settler-colonialists treat the indigenous people of the places they conquer.

The absurd physical appearance of this low-budget alien–a reddish, spotted beachball with two red, clawed feet–can be seen to represent how the racist colonialist regards the aboriginals as clownish-looking in their–in the opinion of the colonialist–odd attire and darker skin. The alien whimpers in a high-pitched voice, which can also be seen to represent the ‘strange’ language of the native.

Pinback originally thought the alien was “cute”; now, he just finds it annoying. This is not quite so unlike the white racist who imagines blacks to be all just a bunch of entertaining song-and-dance men; then, when they show their wish to be more than that, he is annoyed with them.

Pinback complains about having to do all the work and getting no appreciation–I can hear echoes of “the white man’s burden” here–then the alien jumps on his back. As I said above, this intended slapstick comedy would eventually become the terror of the stowaway xenomorph in 1979’s Alien. Thematic connections between Dark Star and Alien can be seen in how a ship’s crew–alienated from each other and from their own species-essences–are taking aboard an alien to exploit it in some way (as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would use the xenomorph as a weapon), rather than let it go to live its own life.

Pinback would use the alien as Dark Star‘s ‘mascot,’ but it has other ideas…naturally. Since the comedy of this sequence doesn’t exactly work, I find it more useful to allegorize it as an instance of the native attempting an insurrection against the colonizer.

The crew of Dark Star are space colonizers, who as I’ve said are allegorical of colonizers here on Earth. Space is thus allegorical of the oceans of the world, the spaceship is the colonizer’s sea vessel, the planets are the islands or other lands of the natives, and of course the ‘beachball’ alien is a native. Now, unstable planets, which are a threat to the space colonizers, can be seen as allegorical of unstable, restive, or rebellious societies that are prone to revolution when colonizers try to control them…hence the need to crush them, or in the case of Dark Star, to blow them up. It is in this context that we should understand the actions of the alien on the ship.

Not only does the alien jump on Pinback and disobey him when he wants it to go back into the dark storage room it was initially in, but it also fights back when Pinback tries disciplining it by hitting it with a broom. Later, it lures him into the ship’s elevator shaft…right when the elevator’s to be activated randomly due to more malfunctions, thus putting Pinback in danger. The alien jumps him there, too, putting him in greater danger, since the elevator is about to descend while he’s still hanging there.

He manages to survive and get out of there, but by that time, the alien has activated the bomb’s circuits, which will cause Bomb #20 to emerge from the bomb bay again when not wanted to do so. All of these acts of the alien should not be trivialized as being merely “mischievous,” as the Wikipedia article on the movie characterizes them; they are an attempted rebellion against colonizers.

Once again, the computer has to convince the headstrong bomb to return to the bomb bay, as the crew has not ordered the destruction of an unstable planet yet; after all, they haven’t yet reached the Veil Nebula. Bomb #20 complies again, yet it’s even more petulant and reluctant about it, since blowing up is its whole raison d’être.

It says that this will be the last time it complies, ominously. This AI system is clearly insistent on having its own way, which is not only indicative of how irrational it is, but also how dangerous it is to everyone impacted by it…rather like HAL in 2001, or any misused technology, for that matter.

Now that Pinback is safe, he’s pissed at the alien. He strides through a hall and gets a tranquilizer gun, and as he does so, we hear a military beat played on a snare drum. This music is fitting, given he’s one of the space colonists about to show the, as it were, indigenous alien who’s boss, like a true imperialist. His intention is to discipline the alien with a tranquilizing, not to kill it…though the shot from the gun does kill it, making it deflate and fly about the place like an actual beachball; Pinback surmises it was full of gas.

The almost comical way that the alien dies is tragically apt, given the slight regard colonizers have always had for their victimized natives. Keep in mind how the IDF have joked about and celebrated, in cruelly ghoulish fashion, their brutal killing of the dehumanized Palestinians. Note, in this connection, Pinback’s words on shooting the alien: “Now it’s time to go sleepy-pie, you worthless piece of garbage.”

Doolittle, in his incompetence, couldn’t care about the increasing technical issues of the ship any more than he does about Pinback’s traumatizing incident with the alien in the elevator shaft, or whether or not there’s any intelligent life in the Veil Nebula. These three forms of apathy are interrelated, as far as my allegory of late imperialism and colonialism are concerned.

Doolittle personifies the oligarchs, neocons, and neoliberals today who know of all the dangers we face today on our dying planet, yet do nothing substantive about it; he also personifies the lack of empathy for others’ suffering that is so endemic today; and since intelligent, alien life corresponds with indigenous people in my allegory, then Doolittle in his lack of caring about such life represents the slight regard colonialists have towards natives.

Talby, on the other hand, does care about the new damage the ship has sustained, so he goes to take a look and see if he can repair it. It’s significant that the door to the Computer Room, which Talby is headed to, is shaped like a coffin. In this room, he is going to find out how fatal the damage will be if it isn’t properly repaired. There’s a break in the communications laser down by the emergency airlock.

Meanwhile Pinback wants to tell Dolittle and Boiler the story of how he came to be one of the crew on Dark Star, but the other two, having heard it before a few years ago, don’t want to hear it again. Pinback tells the story anyway, which includes his name not really being Pinback, but Bill Froug (after William Froug, an American TV writer and producer). He replaced the real Pinback after he took off his uniform, ran naked into a fuel tank, and killed himself; Froug then put on the uniform and was rushed onto the ship, which was just about to go off on its mission.

This switching of identities represents Pinback’s alienation from his species-essence; such an alienation can be tied to his alienation from his fellow crew members. Accordingly, he complains in video recordings of how unfairly he’s treated by the rest of the crew. Alienation can also explain why the real Pinback would rather kill himself than go on the ship.

With the help of the computer, Talby has found the source of the malfunction: communication laser 17 has been damaged, which happened during the asteroid storm. This laser monitors the jettison primer on the bomb drop mechanism. Not fixing this will lead to Dark Star not destroying the unstable planet in Veil Nebula, but destroying itself. According to my allegory, this fatal negligence represents late imperialism destroying itself.

The laser is located in the emergency airlock, so Talby will put on a spacesuit and go in there to try to repair the malfunction. While he’s doing this, the ship is approaching the unstable planet to be destroyed. Talby wants to tell Doolittle about the damage, but the latter doesn’t want to hear about it, since he, Boiler, and Pinback are about to have Bomb #20 come out and blow up the planet.

The communications laser has been damaged. The commander of the ship doesn’t want to listen to Talby’s warning of the damage. Bomb #20, with its petulant, stubborn male voice, doesn’t want to listen to the computer’s command to return to the bomb bay and abort its aim to blow up. All these men are going to die…because of a lack of communication.

Talby attempts to repair the laser, but he is temporarily blinded by a sudden flash of light, he staggers, and walks into the path of the laser beam, causing far more serious damage to the ship’s computer. The bomb’s release mechanism is disabled, causing Bomb #20 to be stuck in the bomb bay, just when the crew is doing a countdown to detonation.

Here we see the contradictions of colonialism and imperialism as the seeds to their own destruction. The destruction of unstable planets represents the colonizer’s taking over and destroying the worlds of the natives, not caring about the life there, if there even is life there. The excess of this destruction eventually falls back onto oneself, especially when there’s little regard for the safety and proper functioning of one’s own equipment. Imperialism leads to alienation and apathy towards one’s fellow man, which in turn leads to one’s own destruction.

When the crew realizes they can’t get Bomb #20, counting down to its detonation, to be released so they can get away from the explosion, they of course panic. Doolittle commands the bomb to stand down, but the AI in it refuses to. The damaged computer can’t do anything to save the crew.

Doolittle’s only course of action, bizarrely, is to go and revive a dead man–Commander Powell–and ask him how to stop the bomb. Powell, recall, is in a state of cryogenic suspension…a kind of life in death. This idea is a manifestation of a theme that now comes into prominence in Dark Star: the dialectical relationship between existence and non-existence, between life and death.

Powell is strangely alive and dead at the same time. He’s being held in a freezer compartment. When he speaks to Doolittle, it’s in a weak voice, like someone tripping out on drugs.

Powell tells Doolittle to teach the bomb about phenomenology, an objective investigation of the nature of subjective, conscious experience. Doolittle gets in a spacesuit, does an EVA, and begins to have a philosophical discussion with Bomb #20. We can see in this the absurdist comedy of trying to find meaning among self-aware beings about to die, anyway.

The bomb is made aware of Cartesian doubt, that is, how does it know that it exists, and how can it be sure that everything around it exists? The bomb doubts, so it thinks and therefore exists. But if the existence of all other things around it is in doubt, how does the bomb know it has truly received an order to detonate? It pauses its countdown to detonation to ponder these matters further, just in the nick of time, causing Doolittle practically to swoon in relief.

In this Cartesian doubt, we once again see the theme of dialectical unity between existence and non-existence. The theme also exists in how the bomb’s whole reason for existing is to blow up and cause non-existence…what will cause the bomb to blow up, anyway, in spite of the doubtfulness of its externally-derived orders to do so. After all, the safe and stable existence of the space colonizers is dependent on the destruction and, therefore, non-existence of unstable planets that threaten colonization…rather like white colonizers’ ethnic cleansing of natives.

Meanwhile, Boiler thinks he can break the bomb free of the ship by taking that laser rifle he was using before for target practice and shoot the support pins out. Pinback knows Boiler’s idea is crazy, as he’s a bad shot. The two fight. Here, we see, not just a lack of communication leading to late imperialism’s self-destruction (allegorically speaking), but also how fighting and a lack of cooperation or mutual aid lead to it. Boiler wants to use violence to solve the problem; both he and Pinback are throwing punches at each other.

Once the bomb has stood down to ponder its Cartesian doubt, Boiler and Pinback realize they no longer need to fight, so they leave the area where the gun is and return to their stations.

The bomb, however, has decided to go off after all, since as I said above, blowing up is its whole raison d’être. Non-existence is the reason for its existence. Understanding that only itself is provably existent, while absolutely nothing else can be provably so, Bomb #20 goes into a state of solipsism: it’s like Descartes proving his own existence, yet not proceeding to prove the existence of anything else.

This solipsism is thus like the bomb’s rationalization for narcissistic self-absorption. Only it exists, so only it matters; and if its only reason to exist is to destroy itself and become non-existent, then so…be…it. Narcissism leads to the destruction of all of us.

In a horrifying irony, it prefaces its act of annihilation by alluding to the first few verses of chapter one of Genesis, speaking narcissistically as if it were God, bringing about the Creation of the universe. It says, “Let there be light,” and blows up. Yahweh has thus become Shiva, who in destruction allows a new cycle of birth, life, and death to begin. Existence in non-existence.

Just before the ship has been blown up, Doolittle asked Boiler and Pinback to let him back into the ship. They opened the emergency hatch, but Talby was just by it, so he’s been thrown out into space, and Doolittle has to go off to fetch him. With the ship blown up, and Boiler and Pinback dead, Doolittle and Talby see the pieces of the ship floating by in space. The best that the damaged computer could do to mitigate the severity of the blast was to reduce its diameter to a mile around the ship; hence, the unstable planet hasn’t been blown up, and Doolittle and Talby have only been thrown clear, floating in opposite directions.

Though they’re both soon to die, Doolittle and Talby will, in a way, have their earlier wishes fulfilled. The latter will not only get to see the Phoenix asteroids, but he’ll also be carried away with them…to circle the universe forever. He’s thus a kind of Phoenix rising from the ashes of his world’s whole destruction. He’s found heaven in hell, existence in non-existence.

Doolittle sees Powell spinning away in a block of ice. He, too, is experiencing life in death, existence in non-existence. Finally, Doolittle gets his hands on a ladder from the floating debris of the ship. He’ll use this as a kind of makeshift surfboard, and he’ll surf his way to the planet as a falling star and die there, a genuinely funny visual to end the movie, during which we’ll also hear “Benson, Arizona” again during the end credits.

Now, I’m not saying that the comic book superhero had any direct influence on the movie, but I find it irresistible to make an association between the two here. Doolittle, in his silver spacesuit and on the silver ladder-as-surfboard, looks like the Silver Surfer going through space. I find this comparison apt when we consider Dark Star‘s Galactus-like mission, the destruction/consumption of worlds. Doolittle was the herald, as it were, of the mission, and since he’d do little to repair the malfunctioning ship, his destruction of others heralded his own destruction as a falling star.

His fate is rather like how our own short-sighted imperialists, colonialists, and other oligarchs are heralding our and their own destruction, the falling stars of the West.