moon & sun & whisky

I’ve never put words in the mouth of a space alien.

Over my long and varied career, I’ve written dialogue for werewolves, vampires, succubi, dolphins, psychics, talk show hosts pretending to be actors, witches, warlocks, rat men, mole men (Paul Williams!), publishing executives possessed by the spirt of Captain Ahab, ghosts, zombies, trolls, and Jessica Alba. But no,  I don’t think I’ve ever written dialogue for a space alien.

If I did, though, I’m pretty sure that my space aliens would use contractions. Unlike, say, those in every movie and TV show ever made, up to and including the new Remake of Witch Mountain, or whatever it’s called:

They are Seth (Alexander Ludwig) and Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and, like many others of their kind, their English is impeccable, though they are unable to use contractions or slang, or to refer to people by first names alone.

Why don’t they use contractions? So you can tell they’re aliens, of course — unless they’re Native Americans, who are also forced to enunciate every syllable. But this makes even less sense than super-children who can reach through metal and create force fields needing a taxi driver to take them to their rendez-vous spot. After all, where did these aliens learn to speak English? I’ve got to assume they’ve been monitoring our TV and radio broadcasts as they make their way through space. So what shows have they seen or heard where people speak perfect, non-colloquial English? Jerry Springer? Where would they have heard anyone talking like this? Even if their own language is completely inflexible and doesn’t allow variations on a single word, wouldn’t they have been more likely to pick up “don’t” than “do not” by watching the average week’s worth of TV?

And then there’s the thing with names. Okay, maybe they’ve all got one long name, and it’s simply inconceivable for their race to imagine such a concept as a nickname. But how is that creatures advanced enough to navigate the universe are incapable of learning a lesson as simple as this one? Because once an alien greets a human with “Greetings and solicitations, Shawn Spencer” (hey, got to get those Psych searches landing here…), and the human says, “No, it’s just Shawn,” and the alien says “I now comprehend Just Shawn,” it actually shouldn’t take many more words to clear up the confusion. Something like: “In English, we have a last name that we share with our family and a first name that uniquely identifies us. And if you want to pass unrecognized as an alien, it’s important that you learn this distinction.”

So why does this ridiculous conceit continue in movie after movie? Pure laziness. Writers, directors, and executives think they need a little characteristic that will make their aliens stand out as something different, but no so different that the army will start tracking them down the first time they ask a puny human to define what is this thing you earthlings call love. But it’s such a hideous cliche by now that you’d think even the aliens would have figured it out…