Normally, the Alien movie franchise leans into gore and disgust as core parts of its horror, but there is one scene in the original movie that is a poignant outlier. There is a complete lack of nastiness and on-screen violence—it's just good old fashioned terror. This small moment uses abstraction to heighten the tension.
Dallas, the captain of the spaceship where the movie takes place, is trying to find the alien that is now loose in the air ducts. He's wielding a flamethrower, but that just doesn't seem like it's enough in the tight space of ladders and tunnels. The rest of the crew are watching for motion on a radar device and listening to the radio communications. The radar screen displays a dot for the alien and for Dallas. In the dark tunnel, the subtle beeps from the radar, the droplets of sweat flinging from every movement of Dallas's head, the tense music, and the claustrophobic camera angles build up the terror, but the flashes of the radar screen add a special kind of intensity.
It's almost as if you are holding the radar yourself. You look up, then back down to check the screen. Nothing yet—just a dot for Dallas standing still. Look up, listen to the crew getting more anxious. Look down at the screen and a new dot suddenly appears, a trail of pixels behind it indicating where it has been and therefore, where it is going: straight towards Dallas.
"...it's moving right towards you!" an exasperated cry breaks over the radio.
Dallas looks at the ladder next to him then to the open tunnel he's squatting in. He could go up or down the ladder, or move into the tunnel to the left. More beeping from the radar.
"Move! Get outta there!"
The captain starts climbing down the ladder. His dot remains in the same position on-screen. The alien's dot is getting even closer.
"No! ...the other way, Dallas!" the mumbled voice cries over the radio. Dallas reaches the floor and turns. An inhuman squeal pierces the tunnel ambience...
This scene reminded me that we are absolutely capable of looking at an abstraction and seeing humanity in it. Why else would looking at the blue dot on the radar screen feel so intense? There are other techniques used to increase terror, but I think the main driver is that radar (speaking as someone who isn't claustrophobic, so there's that). The radar provides a drastically limited perspective: it's two-dimensional, hence the inability of the crew to help direct Dallas's movement until it was too late, and it's devoid of any other information like walls or distance.
All we have is a dot moving in a single direction—the speed of the dot being abstracted since we have no way to determine whether it's moving rapidly over a large distance, or slowly over a short distance. What we really know is there's a person in danger and that danger is moving towards the person.
Two-Edged Blades Cut Both Ways
The tension between abstractions and people is actually quite paradoxical. It can be extremely enlightening when people are collected in large data sets. That's how we can enable conclusions to be formed through science and research. That's how medical treatments are improved. That's how the understanding of human psychology is refined. It comes with a risk, though, for exploitation, especially when the human behind the abstraction is abandoned.
Stereotypes, assumptions, and prejudicial stories all serve as abstractions. They are shortcuts to some kind of understanding about people, and yet they always fall short in actuality. No one ever understood anyone when they relied exclusively on distant stories about people they've never met.
If abstractions, especially stereotypes, are insufficient to actually understanding someone else, why do we have them? These abstractions help reduce the cognitive load on the brain. We rely on pattern recognition to aid us in a complex world, and our social systems add to that complexity that we have to sort through (1). This becomes the two-edged blade: we must continuously challenge our abstractions if we are committed to seeing the diverse expressions of humanity in others, but that comes at the cost of cognitive effort, and in some cases, deep emotional suffering as we encounter the world of horrors that we inhabit—especially when we start to really see how people are affected by systemic injustice, abuse, and oppression. As always, apply wisdom to your efforts—you need to take care of yourself, too (or so insists my therapist).
The critical piece is recognizing where you are abstracting someone else. It could be in numbers being tracked by your marketing team, it could be in how you think trans people should be, or it could be in racial stereotypes. If we are looking at our mental radar screen, and all we see are blue dots, we are at risk of losing touch with the humans behind those blue dots.
Stereotypes and biases are present in all of us, but there's great news: these can be changed!
“People with better pattern detection abilities are at greater risk of picking up on and applying stereotypes about social groups. However, what’s promising about our findings is that people with higher cognitive ability also tend to more readily update their stereotypes when confronted with new information.”
Cyborg
The world is a dangerous place, and we are social creatures. Our ability to thrive depends largely on how we find belonging. When minority groups are systemically marginalized, their ability to thrive is directly threatened. I’ve felt it as a closeted queer person, where my whole world was isolation and suicidal ideation. When I finally rejected the social pressure of my main social group to remain in agony and deny who I was, I became free of some of the burdens I carried, but I still needed connection and ultimately a new social group that would welcome me as I really am.
There’s a lot that we can do. Let's take a look at racial inequality in the U.S. (and similar patterns found throughout the world). It still exists and it is something that we can help dismantle by starting with our own abstractions that we’ve subtly relied on. This is a painful process, but it’s nothing compared to the anxiety and entrapment minorities face daily. They are stuck in the tunnel, and we are watching from afar, relying on little blue dots to “understand” them.
So here's one place to start. Check out what Ijeoma Oluo says in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race?:
Microaggressions are a serious problem beyond the emotional and physical effects they have on the person they are perpetrated against. They have much broader social implications. They normalize racism. They make racist assumptions a part of everyday life. The assumption that a black father isn't in the picture reinforces an image of irresponsible black men that keeps them from being hired for jobs. The assumption that a Latinx woman doesn't speak good English keeps her from a promotion. The assumption that a child of color's parents wouldn't have a college degree encourages guidance counselors to set lower goals for that child. The assumption that black people are "angry" prevents black people from being taken seriously when airing legitimate grievances. These micro aggressions help hold the system of White Supremacy together, because if we didn't have all these little ways to separate and dehumanize people, we would empathize with them more fully, and then we'd have to really care about the system that is crushing them.
When you catch yourself making assumptions, ask yourself if you really have any evidence for it. Is there something missing in your understanding? Maybe you knew a trans person once—is that really enough? Is your only source of information about an "other" coming from someone like you? Should we really define an entire group of complex people by one experience or one convenient story (one that prioritizes the comfort of the majority over the lived experience of the minority)?
There’s no avoiding some pain and some fear in this process, but maybe as we improve our "radar" to have more dimensions, more information, more nuance, we can help people escape the tunnels instead of keeping them perpetually trapped under there.
Further Reading
- So You Want to Talk about Race? by Ijeoma Oluo
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Works Cited
- Editorial: The psychological process of stereotyping: Content, forming, internalizing, mechanisms, effects, and interventions, Front Psychology, 2023 Jan 5, by Baoshan Zhang, Yibo Hu, Fengqing Zhao, Fangfang Wen, Junhua Dang, Magdalena Zawisza
- Higher Cognitive Abilities Linked to Greater Risk of Stereotyping, NYU News, 2017 Jul 24