Content warning: Discussion of sexual assault and suicide.
What does it mean to be expendable? Over the pandemic, many of us learned firsthand. Some were discarded in mass layoffs, and others, deemed “essential workers,” risked exposure to a disabling-if-not-deadly virus every time they clocked in.
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But worker exploitation did not begin with the pandemic. A defining – though perhaps unlikely – work on the subject is Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror Alien, which imagines what expendability might look like on the final frontier. Don’t let its seventies retrofuturism fool you; half a century later, the franchise retains a strong following, inspiring sequels, prequels, knock offs and fine works in their own right. These include game studio Wrong Organ’s 2024 indie sci-fi horror title ‘Mouthwashing’, which is a clear homage to Alien’s unsettling atmosphere as well as other horror titles of the 70s and 80s (fans have been quick to note a certain character’s resemblance to Shelley Duvall in The Shining), yet also adds its own take to the dialogue of exploitation observed in Scott’s film.
The similarities between Alien’s Nostromo vessel and ‘Mouthwashing’’s Tulpar are striking; both are freighters, run by small, working-class crews, transporting goods for shadowy employers. The retrofuturistic aesthetic also persists on the Tulpar, with its blocky green computer technology and lounge’s conversation pit.
Additionally, both stories feature an unwanted pregnancy. But where Nostromo’s Executive Officer Thomas Kane is forcibly impregnated – and subsequently killed – by an alien lifeform, Tulpar’s nurse, Anya, falls pregnant following her rape by the ship’s copilot Jimmy. This is perhaps the largest difference between Alien and ‘Mouthwashing’, at least thematically – in Mouthwashing, there is no alien lifeform lurking in the shadows, just the cruel fact of workplace sexual assault, and you can’t cover your eyes whenever Jimmy’s onscreen. He’s the protagonist. You move through the game through his eyes.
Yet Jimmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When we see Anya discuss her assault with her captain, Curly, he’s quick to suggest that the incident doesn’t have to be recorded on the crew’s performance log. He then assures her that he “knows” Jimmy, and will talk to him about the incident – except when the confrontation comes, Curly is stopped in his tracks by Jimmy’s reminder that this could jeopardize both of their careers. Instead, Jimmy suggests – and later attempts – a brutal murder-suicide by crashing the Tulpar into an asteroid to avoid the inevitable consequences. Curly tries to intervene, but this only results in horrific injuries that leave him mute and bed bound.
Once the mission’s leader, Curly is suddenly rendered more powerless than any of his crewmates. When Anya can’t bring herself to give the helpless Curly his painkillers, the responsibility becomes Jimmy’s, who is now the acting captain. It’s implied that before the crash Jimmy was envious of Curly’s position, and he insists upon being referred to as the captain once he takes over – even though he crumbles under the pressure. Jimmy takes out his frustration on Curly by force-feeding him the pills, the latter unable to object beyond choked, pained noises. While Anya’s assault takes place just before the start of the game, Jimmy’s treatment of Curly feels like something of a parallel – and, by putting the player in control of Jimmy, makes it inescapable for the audience.
It’s likely that Jimmy’s cruelty towards Curly, alongside being trapped on a ship with her rapist and the bleak prospects of their dwindling resources, all contribute to her eventual suicide by overdose. After Anya’s death, Curly becomes even more of a target for Jimmy’s violent outbursts, and like Alien’s Kane, Curly is immobilized with his autonomy taken away. While he does not share Kane’s unfortunate fate of “birthing” an alien, Jimmy’s mistreatment of him is a violation all its own.
That said, in both Alien and ‘Mouthwashing’, the cycle of violence does not start with any mere crew member, regardless of rank. In both cases it goes all the way to the employers: the companies of Weyland-Yutani and Pony Express respectively. In Alien, this is a plot twist: after several crew members have been killed by the Xenomorph, Warrant Officer Ripley discovers Special Order #937, given to the ship’s science officer, Ash: “Ensure return of organism for analysis…all other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.”
‘Mouthwashing’, meanwhile, reveals early on that the crew is being unceremoniously laid off with Pony Express citing bankruptcy. The expendability of the workers isn’t a twist at all: rather, it sets the stage for the desperate, violent murder-suicide attempt that Jimmy hopes will spare him – and Curly – from an uncertain future. Swansea, the ship’s mechanic, puts it best: “What a joke. And we’re the punchline.”
In both works, the crew members are picked off one-by-one – though in ‘Mouthwashing’, there’s no alien lurking in the shadows. After Anya barricades herself in the medical bay, Jimmy pressures Swansea’s peppy young intern, Daisuke, into travelling through a dangerous part of the ship in an attempt to save her, which leads to his death. When Swansea confronts him for his role in Daisuke’s – and Anya’s – fates, Jimmy kills him too.
Curly, though, Jimmy keeps alive, through increasingly desperate means. At his lowest point, he hacks a piece of Curly’s leg off and feeds it to him, hallucinating Curly assuring him that he’ll be considered “the better man in the end.” In this surreal sequence, Jimmy falls to his knees and apologizes, vowing to take responsibility – something the player has seen him avoid time and time again. In his final hallucination, the Pony Express mascot, Polle, even taunts him for it, asking, “You really mean that, huh?”
Yet it seems that Jimmy does mean it: in fact, Curly is the only person he tries to apologize to. Even then, his remorse is incredibly limited, with his hallucination of Curly touching on how he’s remembered rather than actually addressing the harm he caused. After all, Jimmy is in a near-constant state of flight from accountability, despite his insistence otherwise: he expresses no remorse for sexually assaulting Anya, and instead only dreads the burden of fatherhood, with many of his hallucinations centred around pregnancy and childbirth. All he fears is his own future and the consequences of his actions, rather than the actions themselves. Besides the monstrous, fleshy forms of Polle, he mostly hallucinates Curly, and bemoans how he’s failed Curly in particular; his friend, his boss, and his biggest enabler. In the end, he gives Curly the Tulpar’s sole escape pod, declaring that he’s “fixed” everything, and shoots himself in the head – a quick, clean death, a final escape from his consequences. The Tulpar is left a tomb. Nobody has a say in any of it. Exploited, expendable bodies, exploiting one another right to the end.
‘Mouthwashing’, in many ways, feels like a response to the warnings of worker exploitation in Alien, removing the outside monstrous force and instead focusing on the worker perpetuating violence as he himself is violated. What makes Jimmy terrifying is that there are men out there just like him – and men like Curly out there happy to protect abusers. You can tell them to take responsibility a thousand times, but until they know what that actually means, until we can dismantle the system that perpetuates and praises exploitation, they’re not going to change. Neither Alien nor ‘Mouthwashing’ provide insight on how to break this cycle of violation, but their warnings could not be more clear: we cannot view each other as expendable, as collateral to the bottom line, as anything less than the people we are. Losing sight of that is the first step in upholding the violence of the status quo.
