There have been other space cats, sure. For instance, this guy.
But when I think of space cats, the first one I think of—the best and only—is Jones, smallest crew member of the Nostromo.
An important thing to know about me is that my parents never censored what I watched. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood, what made me ME, the way I think many people do when they lose a parent. How did those choices shape me? What would I be if different choices were made? I tend to think of myself like Hannibal Lecter: “Nothing made me happen. I happened.” And I stand by that for the most part. But there were a couple things that I can lay squarely at my parents’ feet, and one of them was that if they wanted to watch something they watched it, and if I didn’t like it I could leave the room.
Now this might sound harsh to some people, but I thrived in this arrangement, because it meant I could sit there and watch whatever was on TV. Do the Right Thing? Key Largo? Platoon? Temple of Doom? A Shot in the Dark? The Deer Hunter? Sudden Impact? Imitation of Life? Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Fawlty Towers? Amadeus?
If I didn’t like them, I could leave—but I liked them. (And I would argue that knowing the Russian Roulette scene and Radio Raheem both before I hit middle school was good for my brain—and seeing the gap between Imitation of Life and a Spike Lee Joint was even better.)
Among the things that I chose to stay in the room for, at much too young an age, was Alien.
I’ve talked a few times on this site about how almost nothing scares me, and I tend to give the credit to Poltergeist. But Alien can only have helped—for me the scary part was the space outside the ship, not the Alien itself. That was just a fun movie monster as far as I was concerned. But what I do remember being afraid about was Jones.
From the minute they introduce Jones, eating dinner on the table with the rest of the crew of the Nostromo, I got nervous. Surely Jones was going to be the sacrificial lamb here, right? He’d disappear, or they’d find… parts of him—and that was how the human crew would know there was a monster in the ship? My nervousness only grew as I saw that Jones was especially bonded with Ripley. I knew Ripley was the star here, I’d seen Ghostbusters by then and Sigourney Weaver was an icon.
But let me go back to that introduction for a sec.
We meet Jones, an orange cat, crouched on the table in the mess hall chowing down on some cat food while the human crew sits around chowing down on some human food. They’ve all been in cryosleep; they’ve just been awakened by “Mother” the ship’s AI, even thought they’re still 6 months from home. No one’s terrible happy about it. What struck me watching it as a kid is the same thing that strikes me now, after considerably more sci-fi has been uploaded into my brain: Jones is just there. No one makes a fuss about him being on the table, he doesn’t talk, he’s not psychic, he’s just a standard-issue cat. Because the Nostromo crew are just standard-issue humans (well, mostly), working-class folk on a gig. Presumably they’ve brought Jones along for pest control.
Which is funny, given what happens when a pest shows up.
I think it’s also important to underline something I just said: there’s nothing special about Jones. He doesn’t sense (or signal) that there’s anything weird about Ash. When the away team stumbles across the Alien’s nest, he’s getting scritches from Ripley and blissfully unaware there’s a problem, And we don’t see Jones interact with Kane after he’s non-consensually face-hugged. There’s no scene of the hypersensitive cat hissing at him, or batting at the poor man’s chest to warn us of the horrors to come. Once the Alien is loose, is there a scene of him stalking it, hiding from it, in any way interacting with it? Hello no! Because Jones is just a cat, and he’s off doing cat things. Sleeping, cleaning himself, staring at things that aren’t there, going apeshit at 5:00 in the morning, who knows? We don’t, because we’re with what the film thinks is the main plot, following the crew in their tense game of cat-and-mouse with the Xenomorph. But Jones doesn’t care about that. (He’s an orange boi, it’s entirely likely that he doesn’t even know anything’s wrong.)
When we see him again it’s because he, in his ignorance, causes one of the great fake-outs in horror cinema. Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they’re on the trail of the alien. At this point the film still feels like a horrific adventure tale, man vs beast, rather than And Then There Were None In Space. The crew hears noises in a locker. It must be the Alien, right? What else would be hidden away in there? They throw the door open, and out jumps—Jones! Yowling as he flies through the air right into their faces, and right around a corner into the darkness.
How’d he get in there? Why is the locker fastened shut? Well, as I mentioned, he’s an orange boi. I’m going to go ahead and assume that Jonesy gets himself stuck in one of those lockers at least twice a week when he’s not in cryosleep. But in their justifiable terror over the Alien, the Nostromo crew forgot that they also live with a cat that has never had a single thought in his adorable ginger head.
Brett goes after him, the same way he’d look for a human crew member who might be in danger. As a kid I appreciated this. But now, knowing horror conventions a little better, well, they’ve split the party, one lone vulnerable human is venturing into dark corridors on a mission of mercy—he’s a dead man walking. But what’s interesting is that, first, he immediately goes after the cat. There’s no thought, or hesitation: Jones is part of the crew. But also of course once he finds Jones we get a dark take on “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” as we see Jones reacting to the Alien right before it pounces on Brett. Does Jones run? Nope. Again, he’s a cat. He crouches down and watches as the Alien eats his human friend, all but taking notes on the monster’s technique.
In the end it comes down to Ripley. She tries to save the crew, she tries to get everyone to the shuttle, but even then, she remembers Jones.
And this is my sharpest memory from that first watch, sitting tense on the carpet in front of the TV, sure that the three humans were going to get to the shuttle just as the Alien closed in and fly off into space without a backward glance. They were going to leave Jones to his fate. Even after Brett’s sacrifice I was convinced—we were in the end of the movie now, when things get serious and sacrifices are made. The cat’s life wasn’t going to be worth as much as the humans. I was, after all, deep in the trenches of children’s literature. I knew what happened when the poor family couldn’t feed the pet deer anymore, and what happened when the dog got bit by a rabid wolf, and what happened when the horse’s knees went out. I knew where the red fern fucking grew. Those earlier scenes of the crew caring about Jones were just to get us invested; now the movie would hit us with the gut-punch of the last three humans realizing they’d forgotten Jones, and being sad about it. Maybe Ripley would even prove she was a girl by crying.
I curled into the carpet and waited to be pissed off.
Imagine my shock when Ripley stopped cold during her escape and said “Jones!” And more than that, when she found a far-future cat carrier, and ran back to find him?
Sure, the other two humans die before they can get to the shuttle. And Ripley has some pretty severe PTSD, and things don’t exactly go well for her after this movie. But for that one moment, I got to watch a movie that didn’t use the helpless pet as a sacrifice to cheap sadness. And even better, after Ripley’s gotten herself and Jonesy to the shuttle (and before she knows there’s a certain phallic stowaway lying in wait) Jones is still just a cat. He’s furious that she stuffed him in that carrier. He doesn’t like to be held. What in a bad movie would be a scene of the cute kitty cuddling into his rescuer, is instead absolutely realistic: he holds himself stiff, pins his ears back, and seems a hair’s breadth away from clawing Ripley’s eyes right out of her head. (If you’ve ever lived with a cat, this scene might be the scariest moment in the film.) She just barely gets him tucked away safely into the cryochamber before he wiggles out of her arms.
Haunted house movie in space? The sixth scariest horror movie ever according to the AFI? I think not. Alien is a feel-good movie where the cat gets to live.
