How Bill Paxton Made Me A Better Writer

I know I’ve been somewhat delinquent in updating.  The truth is, it takes many hours to write one of these.  Multiple days if I wanted to do it better than I have been so far.  But I have a day job and more than once I’ve gotten home from work at 8pm, gotten something to eat, and started one of these articles only to finally post it at 5 or 6am before taking a shower during which I fall asleep multiple times, then crawl into bed and log about four hours of snooze time before I have to get up and start getting ready for work.  And then my employer wonders why I don’t seem to have any energy.

So I worked seven days straight last week, and then spent three recovering, and spending a little time with friends and family.  Yesterday at work it felt like my only speed was reverse.  Anyway this is a long way of saying, this article is a week overdue but I’ve known all week that I wanted to write it.  This is the story of how Bill Paxton made me a better writer.

No, I never met him.  This story goes back to my years studying Art at Longwood University (or Longwood College as it was then known).  After a tumultuous freshman year during which I experienced a bit of culture shock while steadfastly refusing to sell out my personal values, I settled into a kind of rhythm in my sophomore year that carried me all the way through to graduation.  I found my people, and surrounded myself with them, and I always knew that no matter how crappy a given day was, it would end with time spent among friends.  It is friendship that got me through.

That sophomore year that established this structure, I was sharing a dorm room with a guy named Wayne, whom I had known from my freshman hall.  Wayne is absolutely one of my people, and he helped me find the others.  Sophomore year we shared a suite in Frasier hall with two guys named Nayan and Mikee.  Nayan was a science major, who also happened to be an incredible guitarist with a love of blues and alternative rock, and Mikee was a skater who was studying commercial art.  Two of the nicest guys I ever knew, and the four of us, though we had different interests, were united by our love of movies.

Now as a kid, I didn’t get to the theater all that much.  My earliest memories of the movie theater are seeing “Stir Crazy” in the movie theater on base in Dahlgren – making the “we bad” scene a part of my personal head canon that none of my friends ever understood – and the Robert Redford baseball movie “The Natural.”  I remember seeing “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Back to the Future,” but my parents have never been big on going to the movie theater, and until I was old enough to go to the movies myself or with my friends, I only got to go once in a while.

So in college, I had a lot of catching up to do as far as seeing movies I’d missed out on in my childhood.  Wayne and I would rent a few movies on a Friday night and often they were ones he liked and that I had never seen.  The ones I liked I’d end up buying for my collection and then we’d watch them often.  I’d put a movie on while I worked on a painting, maybe we’d have “Empire” in while we were doing homework.  We communicated almost exclusively in movie quotes.

Among the movies Wayne introduced me to, and that I loved and added to my collection, was the Alien Trilogy (for at the time, three is all there were).  If I remember correctly, it was Nayan who knew somebody who had the director’s cut of Aliens, a VHS tape dubbed from a laser disc, which not even Wayne had seen.  And “Aliens” is one of the movies that most influences me as a storyteller.  It’s on the short list with RoboCop and the Star Wars Trilogy in terms of movies that taught me about storytelling, and as quotable as the original “Ghostbusters,” or “Die Hard,” both of which I would easily place alongside “RoboCop,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on the list of 80’s movies that are among the most perfect films ever made.

Everything about “Aliens” functions beautifully as well.  You may remember this article that I wrote recently about how the audience can accept almost anything if they have a good surrogate among the main cast who echoes their own feelings and perceptions.  “Aliens” is a movie that understands that.  It opens more or less where “Alien” left off, with Ripley and her cat Jones, in cryogenic sleep aboard the escape pod after destroying the Nostromo and blowing the Alien drone out of the airlock.

She’s discovered by a deep salvage crew, and wakes up in a med bay to learn that she’s been adrift in space for 57 years, and everyone she knew, including her daughter whose 11^th birthday she had hoped to be home in time for, has died.  Haunted by the memory of her ordeal aboard Nostromo and buried under two layers of survivor’s guilt, Ripley has taken a job as a dockworker, and sees a therapist regularly.  She is miserable, and probably suffering from PTSD, though I would say this last piece is only clearly demonstrated in the third film.

Then, of course, the Weyland-Yutani corporation loses contact with the colony “Hadley’s Hope” on LV-426, and deploys a squad of space marines to investigate.  LV-426 is the planet where the wrecked spacecraft was discovered by the Nostromo crew in the original film, with its chamber full of eggs, where John Hurt was attacked by the facehugger that planted the embryo in his body, which so dramatically burst out of his chest in that first film’s most iconic scene.

In the director’s cut of “Aliens,” of course, we’ve already watched as a family in a rover discovers the same wreck, and as the mother frantically drags the father, with facehugger attached, back to the rover in full view of the children, her daughter screaming hysterically as she radios for help.

Paul Reiser, who plays a Weyland-Yutani officer named Burke, recruits Ripley to join to the expedition to LV-426 as she is the closest thing they have to an expert on the aliens, being the only known survivor of an alien attack.  This also gives her a chance to face the thing that haunts her nightmares, and to try to reclaim control of her life.

Throughout the beginning of the film, Ripley is the outsider.  Nobody believes her about the alien until Hadley’s Hope goes dark.  Even then they’re skeptical.  And we, as the audience, have seen the first film and know that Ripley’s telling the truth.  But moving forward, we’re going into territory that’s going to be familiar yet horribly difficult for Ripley, and James Cameron knew that there would be people who watched his movie who never saw the first one.  So, while Ripley is a fine surrogate for those of us who know what happened to her in the first movie, the newcomers will need a new surrogate.

Enter Bill Paxton, as Private William Hudson.  PFC Hudson is mouthy, emotional and erratic: in short he’s the guy the rest of the squad probably wishes were not with them, because a guy like that can get you killed in combat.  But from a storytelling perspective he’s crucial.  The reason is simple.  Watch every scene that Hudson is in, particularly when we first meet the marines.  By being the wise-ass who torques everybody, he gives the rest of the characters a chance to show us who they are.

Whether it’s Sergeant Apone (above) or PFC Vasquez, Hudson’s antics are the catalyst for them to show their personalities and attitudes.  It’s simple and effective.

Hudson is also the conduit by which we find out that Lance Henriksen’s character is a synthetic – which freaks out Ripley given what happened between her and Ian Holm’s character Ash in the original.

Then, as the action ramps up and the film intensifies, Hudson’s attitude creates levity for the viewer, which keeps everything from getting too heavy, something that would probably make a film about phallus-headed cockroach aliens collapse very quickly into the realm of farce.  He keeps the audience laughing no matter how horrible things get within the context of the movie itself.  He’s a joker, a cynic, a wise-ass.  In short, if you want new audience members to buy into this kind of madness, you need Hudson.  I learned that lesson, about audience surrogates, from watching this movie until I could just about quote it end-to-end.

It’s telling, I think, that when Hudson finally exits the film, it’s at a time when the number of characters has been scaled back to just a few, where the time for joking has passed, and where if the audience is not now onboard, they never will be.  It’s just Ripley, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, Newt, and Lance Henriksen’s synthetic, Bishop.  It’s also important to note that Hudson never upstages Ripley as the main character.  Hudson’s moments are standouts, but he’s almost entirely unmanned when the drop ship crashes on the way to pull them out, and it’s Ripley who settles him down.  It’s Ripley who, having lived through the nightmare aboard the Nostromo, never loses her wits in the horrors of Hadley’s Hope.  She’s a mama bear, she takes charge and in the end, it’s Ripley who takes out the Alien queen and gets Newt, Hicks, and what’s left of Bishop to safety.

Ripley is absolutely the hero of the film, but Hudson gets the job of making her show us why.  In many ways it’s a thankless task, playing the ass, but Bill Paxton did it so well that he’s remembered for it, probably more than any other role he played.  I was always happy to see him in anything I was watching.  The fact that he was Hudson made him a favorite of fanboys like me.  It was upsetting to hear that he had passed away, but I am truly thankful for the work that he did.  My life would not be the same without PFC Hudson and his smart mouth, and I would not be the storyteller that I am.  So, Bill Paxton, thank you for the good work, sir.  Godspeed.