We’re More Than Our Aliens: Sex, Sexuality, & Aliens in Super Deluxe

The genre-bending Tamil sci-fi/sex-comedy challenges sexual norms, even as it falls back on sexual normativity.

by Shinjini Dey

The figure of the alien requires no introduction. It’s a category and a concept that is as common on immigration forms as it is in literature and film, simultaneously representing a single entity and the existence of many others of its kind while signaling dissolution, destabilization, and invasion. 

The alien in Super Deluxe, a Tamil film by Thiagarajan Kumararaja produced in South India, is singular. It plays the part of a deus ex machina, explaining all that is constructed and contrived to a cloned human companion. It offers resolution and sexual intimacy, and a sigh of relief during the climax, as the four narratives that make up this film—each revolving around sex and sexuality—collapse to credits. 

Mainstream Indian cinema in Hindi tends to shy away from both sex and aliens, despite its penchant for cross-genre entertainment and non-realist modes of storytelling. Sex is usually referred to through figures of speech, allegories, and metaphors, while aliens function as stand-ins for religious myths and/or scientific development. While filmmakers experiment with regional languages, it is rare that both of these equally destabilizing categories are portrayed within the same film. After all, don’t aliens, as much as sexual expression and sexuality, threaten the fabric of a society that values normativity and homogeneity?

A caveat for those who understand the language of film as well as those who are harmed by institutional violence: Super Deluxe is kinder to its aliens than it is to its female characters (cis and trans both). Better readers of the poetic and technical forms in film have often remarked that the camera forces audiences to take the position of the aggressor, building drama through the violence meted out to the women depicted on-screen. Without discounting the validity of this critique, a film like Super Deluxe is also an opportunity to reflect on  aliens and sex. 

Mainstream Indian cinema in Hindi tends to shy away from both sex and aliens, despite its penchant for non-realist modes of storytelling. 

Like most commercial Indian cinema Super Deluxe is a “masala” film, a form characterized by jamming as many genres and sub-narratives as possible into a three-hour-long extravagant and vibrant romp. The film weaves together four interlocking narratives, each of which blends sex and sexuality with social scandal and the shame of sexual knowledge: The panic of a young married woman who has a dead lover in her marriage bed. The humiliation of four school boys watching porn. The shock of a large family and neighbors when they discover the person they know as their father is a trans woman. The shame of a cult leader when he learns that his wife is a sex worker.

The film is heavily edited, with the weight of intention creeping into the medium—cuts and splices multiply throughout. The musical is full of staccato pauses as it moves from background to foreground. The setting remains static while all the characters are quickly called to attendance. The camera lingers behind frames: waiting by doors, shop windows, and panoramas as if afraid to enter any one particular narrative.  

But it isn’t sexual tension or emotional weight that keeps these narratives moving at breakneck speed, but rather the ominous heft of potential scandal. It is the churning of violent institutions like families and marriages and police stations, fed hints of information and rumours, that threaten to catch and overtake you if you just dare to stand still: a patriarchal justice acting upon patriarchal fears and fantasies. 

It is only after the alien reveals herself—by literally taking off her human skin—that the spliced and cut scenes begin to calmly blend into each other. The end is gentle, reassuring, and even tender. A couple flirts and banters about sex (without judgement!) on an empty dusk-lit roof. Everything, they say to each other, is constructed, even morality. 

The alien as a sexual object is not a new phenomenon in film. The alien is always potentially sexual: as an attractive but infantilized being more likely to suck you off than kill you; as a sexual predator; or as an otherworldly being with almost supernatural sexual prowess and vitality. As a sexual object, the alien often functions as a male fantasy or anxiety, a conservative ethical dilemma, and a racist and misogynist stereotype. In its more negative representations, the alien is emasculating or effeminizing, while asexual aliens threaten the institutions of marriage and family. 

As a sexual object, the alien often functions as a male fantasy or anxiety, a conservative ethical dilemma, or a racist and misogynist stereotype. 

According to Jason Coffman, the American sex film industry spawned reel after reel of sci-fi erotica thanks to the tone set by science fiction film and literature. Parodies and pastiches of mainstream cinema’s aliens glowed across television screens in softcore porn with titles like SpiderBabe and Alien Sex Files, while mainstream cinema produced commercial films with higher budgets inspired by the same sci-fi  porn (Species, for example). Today, both hardcore and softcore porn develop and designs its own aliens, with their own lines of merchandise and roleplaying scenarios. Globalization and the ubiquitous presence of the internet has made sure that the exoticized Indian and the exoticized alien can be found on porn sites within a single tagged phrase.  

Super Deluxe revels in this commodification of aliens and of sex. Explicitly, the film is framed by porn, beginning and ending with a pornographic film playing across a lit screen. It begins with the sale of an unmarked DVD and ends with the buying of a movie ticket. Implicitly, the film also attempts to subvert the male fantasies so dominant in porn: a woman takes off her clothes only to reveal that she is an alien; a sex worker explains that she only wanted to act in a film and portray a goddess; the alien clones a boy only to have sex with him. But each subversion  gives rise to ironic laughter about female sexuality, and to more porn.     

Sex and sexuality circulate amidst the images of the film through gossip and rumor; their effects are felt as violence, humiliation, and shame. The audience is kept taut through these tensions and techniques. Even the sensational form geared toward the commercialization and wide appeal of Super Deluxe itself reflects a certain fetishization and commodification of sex. Almost despite itself, the film is structured by sexually-othered and charged scandals in the same way that capitalist society is structured by  commodities.

The figure of the alien, contrary to convention, appears not to destabilize society or embody its fears, but to tease and titillate. It opens up a new market and a new spectacle. Of course, Super Deluxe does not offer this socioeconomic analysis through the spectre of the alien; it is content to sit in impunity, blaming consumers and consumer society for judging others too harshly.

Even the sensational form of Super Deluxe itself reflects a certain fetishization and commodification of sex. 

A queer and non-normative sexuality compels the so-called normal human to rear its head and assert a stable identity and a stable humanity; aliens exert the same destabilizing force. Consider this final example from the film to explore the yoking of sex and the alien: in the opening sequence of the film, a strikingly precocious young child demands to know when his absentee father will return home; he wants to introduce him to his friends so they stop mocking him by calling him a “test-tube baby.” 

This single phrase contains the demand to assert and maintain a reproductive womanhood—the identification of women with motherhood and the legacy of children, a biological function, and specifically and violently gendered genitalia. This is an anxiety that runs through each of the narratives in the film. It is used to undermine and mock Shilpa, the trans woman and parent of the child. It is used to shame and coerce Vaembu, a young woman, because she has had many lovers. It is  used to deny the labour of the sex worker (both maternal and sexual) by emphasizing her maternal care and responsibility. When there is such force to the demand to further a reproductive womanhood, the contrivance of the alien (again, serving as deus ex machina) seems counterproductive to the film. Wouldn’t it emphasize an alternative to womanhood and femininity? 

Surprisingly, Super Deluxe manages this threat to cis masculinity by making the alien capable of more than one function. The alien can replicate through cloning, as well as reproduce through sexual intercourse. 

On the one hand, this depiction of alien cloning could signal the disruptive power of non-reproductive intimacy and coupling. But within the same sequence, it takes the clone as a sexual partner and undoes its own disruptive potential. It becomes a sexual fantasy of random and exotic encounters, deferring to the limit produced by heterosexual and monogamous norms. But in doing so, it still disgusts, repulses, excites and terrifies the other characters. They refuse the many-dimensional language of the alien, pretend to be dreaming, and run away as fast as they can.

It is this disruptive force of the alien that calls upon us to imagine ways in which we may, as Krizia Puig remarks in The TransAlien Manifesto, “decenter the fulfilment of individualistic forms of satisfaction that cater to meet the needs/fantasies of cis-straight people.”Ultimately, Super Deluxe fails to deliver on the radical promise of the alien, but at least it shows us its trappings. There must be a door its camera is not trained on.

---