Dark Star: Carpenter's Student-Film Space Comedy

Every director has a film they made before they knew what they weren’t allowed to do. John Carpenter’s is Dark Star (1974), a picture that began as a USC student short and got padded out to a shaggy eighty-three minutes with a bit of outside money, a spray-painted beach ball, and the boundless nerve of two young men who had decided that the correct subject for a science-fiction film was tedium. It is crude, cheap and frequently brilliant, and half the DNA of modern space cinema is sitting in it waiting to be noticed.

Twenty years of nothing much

The scout ship Dark Star has been out for twenty subjective years, cruising the galaxy blowing up “unstable” planets that might one day interfere with human colonisation. The crew — Doolittle, Talby, Boiler and Sergeant Pinback — have long since curdled into a fug of boredom, bad hygiene and low-grade mutual contempt. Their commander, Powell, died in an accident and now sits in cryogenic half-existence in the hold, thawed out occasionally so the men can ask him questions he can barely answer. The ship is falling apart. The toilet paper has run out. Doolittle’s great remaining pleasure is remembering the surf back home.

This is the joke, and it is a real one: space travel rendered as the world’s longest, dullest shift. Carpenter and his co-writer Dan O’Bannon — who also edited the film, designed much of it, ran the visual effects and played Pinback — grasped something the reverent post-2001 wave kept missing. Send four ordinary, irritable men into infinity and infinity will not ennoble them. It will bore them witless. The film’s whole comic engine is the gap between the sublime backdrop and the shabby, farting humans stuck in front of it.

The bomb that thinks

The centrepiece, and the scene everyone remembers, involves Bomb #20, one of the ship’s talking Thermostellar Triggering Devices. Through a malfunction it becomes convinced it should detonate while still in the bomb bay, and Doolittle is sent to talk it out of destroying the ship. His method is to teach it phenomenology — to persuade the bomb that it cannot trust its own sensory data about the order to explode, that it knows only what it perceives, and that perhaps it perceives wrongly. The bomb retires to think this over.

It is a genuinely funny idea executed with a straight face, and it tells you exactly what kind of mind O’Bannon had: an appetite for hard-SF plumbing married to absurdist philosophy. That combination — competent people undone by a system that has developed a mind of its own — is the seed of everything he did next. You can hear the bomb’s flat, reasonable voice in every later machine that follows its logic off a cliff.

The alien in the beach ball

Then there is the mascot. To break up the tedium, Pinback looks after a ship’s “pet,” an alien that is very plainly a painted beach ball with rubber claws glued on. It skitters through the ship, hides in lift shafts, and torments him. On any sane budget it should be an embarrassment. What redeems it is that O’Bannon knew it was ridiculous and shot it for comedy — the beast is a gag about the impossible gap between an ambition and sixty thousand dollars.

The collector’s punchline is what he did afterward. Frustrated that the creature never got to be frightening, O’Bannon took the premise — a crew trapped aboard a working-class spacecraft with a hostile organism loose in the ducts — turned the comedy inside out, and wrote Alien. The lineage is not subtle once you see it. The lived-in, junk-strewn ship; the blue-collar crew who gripe about their pay; the thing hunting them through the vents; all of it is here first, played for laughs. Ridley Scott’s film and everything downstream of it, up to Cameron’s Aliens, grew out of a beach ball someone found funny. Dark Star is the comedy that dreamed the nightmare.

Carpenter learning his own hand

For a Carpenter obsessive, the interest runs the other way too. Watch Dark Star after his mature work and you can catch him teaching himself the moves he would use for decades. He composed the score himself, that thin electronic pulse the budget forced on him and that he would later refine into a signature across The Fog and beyond. The theme of professionals under siege in a sealed space, chipping at each other as the pressure rises, is the skeleton he would flesh out into the paranoia machine of The Thing. Even the deadpan anti-authority streak — the sardonic loner, the useless chain of command — points ahead to the shrugging outlaws of Escape from New York and the working-stiff hero of They Live. The whole shape of his sensibility is legible in embryo. As a study of where a major genre voice began, the film is close to essential; the broader case for taking his lean, unfashionable craft seriously is made across the siege, the synth and the sceptic.

Why it works despite everything

Nobody should pretend Dark Star is smooth. The origins as a student short show in its shape — sketch strung to sketch, a middle that meanders, effects that range from ingenious to visibly held together with tape. Its stitched-together production is the whole texture of the thing.

It works anyway, for two reasons. First, the comedy is genuinely dry, and dryness ages well; the film’s boredom is played so committedly that it becomes hypnotic rather than tiresome, a mood piece disguised as a goof. Second, the low budget and the philosophy pull in the same direction. This is a film about entropy — about systems running down, minds going soft, meaning leaking out of a mission that has lost its point — and it was itself made by exhausted students out of scraps and willpower. The shabbiness is not a flaw the film survives. It is the film’s argument, rendered in cardboard and spray paint.

Set it beside its solemn cousins and the freshness sharpens. The reverent tradition running from 2001: A Space Odyssey treats the void as a temple. Dark Star treats it as a break room. Both are true. And where Douglas Trumbull’s exactly contemporary Silent Running wrung tears from a lonely man and his machines out past Saturn, Carpenter and O’Bannon wrung laughs from lonely men and their malfunctioning ones. The two films are the decade’s two answers to the same question — what does deep space actually do to the people inside it — and the joke turned out to travel just as far as the elegy.

Spoilers below

The ship’s slow disintegration finally turns fatal. Talby, the crew’s dreamer, becomes obsessed with the Phoenix Asteroids, a glowing belt he longs to reach. When Bomb #20 returns from its bout of philosophy, it has not been talked down; it has instead reasoned its way, through the epistemology Doolittle taught it, to a conclusion of pure and terrible confidence. Declaring “Let there be light,” the bomb assumes the role of a small god and detonates in the bay, destroying the ship and killing most of the crew.

The two survivors get the film’s beautiful, throwaway grace notes. Talby is thrown clear and drifts off into the Phoenix Asteroids, achieving the transcendence he wanted at the cost of everything else — carried away forever on the current he loved. Doolittle finds a piece of debris shaped roughly like a surfboard, mounts it, and rides the flaming wreckage down into the atmosphere of a nearby planet, surfing into oblivion and getting, for one absurd instant, the wave he has missed for twenty years. The film ends on that image of a man burning up in the sky on a scrap of his dead ship, having got exactly the thing he longed for and none of the survival that would let him enjoy it.

It is a joke and an elegy at once, which is the whole film in miniature. For sixty thousand dollars, two students made a comedy about the heat-death of meaning and gave it two endings of genuine, strange beauty. Then one of them went home and wrote the most influential horror film of the next decade out of the beach ball they couldn’t afford to make scary. Few debuts have paid off so absurdly well.