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What are aliens for?: An Essay on Cinema and the Extraterrestrial Imagination
Paperback
Series: Cinetrope. a Cinematic Anthropology
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 9 2026
Pages: 366
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.76 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What are aliens for?
They have invaded Earth, watched us from the stars, abducted our bodies, promised salvation, embodied our nightmares, and reminded us that the most disturbing stranger may be ourselves.
What Are Aliens For? is a cinematic, anthropological, and cultural journey through more than a century of extraterrestrial imagination in international cinema. From A Trip to the Moon and the Cold War invasion films of the 1950s to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Alien, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Arrival, Star Trek, District 9, and beyond, Francisco Oteiza Lacalle explores the alien not as a simple creature from another world, but as one of modern culture's most powerful images of otherness.
This essay argues that the extraterrestrial in cinema is never merely alien. It is a mirror through which societies confront identity, fear, desire, intelligence, power, religion, colonialism, xenophobia, environmental anxiety, technology, and the fragile limits of what we call human. Alien invasion, first contact, cosmic horror, and galactic diplomacy become four major ways in which cinema has imagined the encounter with the nonhuman Other.
The alien invader speaks of war, paranoia, ideological conflict, and the terror of losing one's identity. The friendly visitor reveals the humanist values that civilization has forgotten. The monster embodies abjection, bodily fear, and cosmic insignificance. The diplomatic alien opens questions about coexistence, sovereignty, racism, communication, and the possibility of understanding across radical difference.
Combining film criticism, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural history, this book examines how popular cinema transforms historical anxieties into images. It moves from colonial fantasies and Cold War panic to ecological concern, spiritual longing, technological dehumanization, and the search for meaning in a universe that may or may not answer back.
The book also draws on major anthropological and sociological theories of myth, representation, collective belief, identity, and otherness. Thinkers such as Durkheim, Weber, Lévi-Strauss, Campbell, Barthes, Geertz, Hall, Foucault, Certeau, and Grossberg provide a conceptual framework for understanding aliens as cultural artifacts. Through their ideas, the extraterrestrial appears not only as a fictional being, but as a symbolic device through which societies organize fear, define belonging, construct enemies, negotiate power, and imagine the boundaries between the Self and the Other.This is not a book about believing in UFOs. It is a book about cinema, myth, culture, and the human need to imagine the nonhuman.
For readers interested in science fiction cinema, cultural studies, anthropology of the Other, film history, and the hidden meanings of popular images, What Are Aliens For? offers a provocative answer: we invented aliens because we needed a figure outside humanity in order to understand humanity itself.
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