When you watch a great movie, read a really good book, or are in some way exposed to a nice piece of storytelling, you may have often had a sense of shifting layers of meaning underneath the surface scenes and characters. Indeed, there are entire disciplines devoted to ferreting out the "real" meaning of stories. Some of the disciplines that propose to be able to decode these occult and secret layers are semiotics (and other deconstructionist philosophies), psychoanalysis, and anthropology.

In relation to narrative, these disciplines propose to show what the author of a story really meant when they wrote their work. There is merit in what many such practitioners of dissective practices say -- yet it is important to take such hair-splitting with a good dose of critical distance. Because, as Freud (a noted hair-splitter and egregious misinterpreter) is often quoted as saying, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

The purpose in understanding such hidden layers of symbol and meaning is, of course, for you as a writer to be able to consciously utilize such ideas as thread in your story-loom. It is, however, extremely important to note that symbols are so packed with meaning as to render them extremely weighty, in the narrative sense. What this means, is simply that it is very, very easy to cross lines of taste and practicality when using symbols in a story. A symbol used badly or obviously is clunky, transparent, and laughable. If such is your intention, you can misuse symbols for highly comedic effect.

But to use symbols seriously, as tools to deepen and enrichen your stories, and particularly your themes, they must be delicately and purposefully applied.

To illustrate this discussion, I have decided to take apart one of the most symbol-laden films ever made; "Alien".

"Here, kitty..."

The best of the four Alien films in terms of outright meaning-packed imagery is the first. The film, thanks to Ridley Scott's brilliant direction and H.R. Giger's inspired alien designs, is simply dripping with symbols.

Let me throw out a question for you at this point. What is an early filmic precedent for the themes contained within Alien? Some of you clever sci-fi junkies out there might point out that Alien was inspired by the 1958 film "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" (which was in turn inspired by the A.E. Van Vogt novel "Voyage of the Space Beagle," the plot of which he actually borrowed from his own 1939 pulp story "The Black Destroyer.") If this is your answer, you'd be wrong. Because the film and early Vogt stories have absolutely nothing thematically to do with "Alien."

If you grasp what "Alien" is really, truly about underneath its gothic-horror atmosphere and lovely, gooey special effects, you might come up with my answer. "Alien"'s filmic precedent (drum-roll please...) is Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic "Cat People."

Both "Alien" and "Cat People" share the same theme. This theme is borne out by every single element in "Alien," and is is endlessly deconstructible and recursive, like a fractal pattern; symbols within symbols that all lead back to the main idea.

That main idea, our shared theme, is fear of female sexuality.

And now the dissection begins. Scalpel, please...

Page 2 >>