Media Theories 2: Binary opposites

Theorist: Claude Levi-Strauss

Theory: Binary opposites

Year of publish: 1958

The basic theory: Conflict between binary opposite forces drives the narrative. In order to know what something/someone really is we need to see what happens when they encounter their opposite.

How is this relevant to film trailers?:

In life everything is defined by relativism. We can only know if a person is truly good until we see what bad looks like in a person. We can only truly appreciate a person’s kindness once we have experienced another person’s cruelty. In a film we can only truly appreciate the evil and moral corruption of the antagonistic characters when we see how they treat the morally straight characters and the purity of the protagonist characters. Likewise, we can only see the moral purity and heroism of the protagonist unless they are pitted against morally corrupt characters and challenged with morally questionable ideas and decisions.

In Alien Covenant we see both the humans and the Alien Xenomorph creatures. In order for the audience to fully appreciate the danger and murderous intent of the Xenomorph Alien we need to see how it reacts in the presence of the human binary opposites. Without the contrast between the two species we as the audience would not appreciate just how potentially lethal the Xenomorph Alien can be. We can see examples of this within the trailer for Alien Covenant - if we forget that a significant percentage of the audience will have already seen previous Alien films so will already know what the Aliens are and what their different subspecies do.

One such example is when we first see the facehugger eggs. On their own we could assume that these were just eggs, nothing more nothing less. The true definition of what the eggs mean is shown to us when we see how they react to their binary opposite (in this case how the predator reacts when presented with potential prey): we see a facehugger eject itself out of the egg into the face of one of the humans and thus know that the Alien is dangerous. Without this contrast, we would not have known the monstrous intent of the Alien or the victim role of the humans.