Dr. A and I saw Ridley Scott’s Prometheus last weekend. We thought it was keen, groovy and swell. The film did, however, deploy one troublesome sci-fi cliche: it had a bald alien. Why are all aliens bald? Is there anti-hair bacteria floating around out there or are they all Michael Jordan fans? I firmly believe that there are hairy aliens. Just look at Mitt Romney who is clearly from the planet Weirdo...
7 thoughts on “Pulp Fiction Thursday: Bald Aliens”
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The alien in “Alien” was bald, if a bit drippy.
Bald aliens send two short hand messages to the reader. Big brainz and ancient age.
Aliens in Star Trek were not all bald . . . especially not on Deep Space Nine, where they could go through a wormhole to the Bad Hair Quadrant of the galaxy. Seriously, every alien race from the other side of the galaxy was distinguished, not by ear and facial make-up as in other Treks, but by their special frumpy hairstyle. And of course we know Vulcans favor bowl cuts.
Who painted that portrait of Terry O’Quinn for the cover???
There were no aliens in ‘The Foundation Trilogy’
This is probably due to some internalized assumptions about existing science, and likely some cultural stereotypes, as well. On our evolutionary travels, we’ve gotten progressively less hairy, so, perhaps, the expectation is that highly evolved aliens capable of traversing the universe would not be hairy at all (and maybe because there’s inevitably a strain of sci-fi that assumes that some aliens are highly-evolved lizards and lizards just aren’t hairy). The cultural part of it might be the longstanding stereotype that brainy people are “eggheads” and have “high foreheads,” so taking that aspect to the extreme means extraterrestrials capable of science beyond ours would necessarily be hairless.
But that’s no alien on the Asimov cover. It’s Hairy Seldon!