The Becomers (2023)
Directed & Written by Zach Clark
Starring Molly Plunk, Mike Lopez, Keith Kelly, Russell Mael, Frank V. Ross, Isabel Alamin, Michael C. Hyatt, & Nich Kauffman.

Comedy / Romance / Sci-Fi

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SPOILERS!
Beware!

Zach Clark brought his latest film The Becomers to Fantasia 2023, a story about two aliens from a distant planet who’ve fled the increasingly awful conditions of home to look for someplace better. The two aliens can’t just walk around in their alien skin, so they snatch peoples’ bodies; an ugly and violent process. The more the aliens see of the world, the more they wonder how they’ll ever be able to make this place home. But regardless of what happens, the two alien lovers have each other, through thick and thin, and they begin to realise that love and co-existence are the two most important things to ensure survival.

Clark’s body-snatching alien romance is a beautiful, smart story about evolving, whether it’s physically, psychologically, or nationally. The aliens who arrive on Earth, seeking their lost lover, are genderless beings who’ve evolved beyond humanity quite a bit, yet their method of snatching bodies is a nasty, destructive one. As they learn more about the horrors of human behaviour, they learn more about themselves, too. The Becomers is about reckoning with power, in many ways; our own power as individuals, the power of others over us, and the nation’s power, as well as how all that power can be abused. In the end, the story is about how to change the way power is exerted, especially if we are the ones who hold the power, and how to question all different forms of power in productive ways.
One of the best scenes in The Becomers is when the alien lovers are finally reunited for the first time and they “conjoin” (an act of alien sex) by fingering each other’s holes through a patch of torn skin where they presumably first entered their human vessel. “I missed your orifice” is perhaps the most gender neutral term that anybody could ever use (which I will now use when speaking to any of future lovers). The aliens don’t see gender—they see HOLES, but they don’t inscribe upon them any definite gender. In one scene, one of the aliens appears in their original form, and the other says they’ve “missed that beautiful face,” as we see their alien bodies are almost formless masses with glowing eyes; there are no gender markers of any kind, and the romantic look of love between them is all in the eyes, those ole windows to the soul. The two genderless aliens snatching bodies from one gender to the next, all the while remaining in love, is a commentary on the ways in which humans are totally obsessed with and hung up on divisions of gender, whereas the aliens see only the love and affection shared between them. And there’s plenty more commentary in The Becomers that reveals many tensions in America.

Aliens in the film represent a need for change and reveal how badly things must change in America. There’s a great use of XOF News; not a subtle reference to FOX, yet a clever one since the first alien we see on Earth uses XOF to learn more English. Clark’s reference to XOF News and the alien watching it is a fantastic nod to the way people are indoctrinated by deeply biased, phobic news stations like FOX. Sadly it’s not aliens being indoctrinated in real life, but rather Americans, and many of them are old people. Yet the same indoctrination can happen to the young. Aliens first arriving on Earth are somewhat like babies, born into a new world and soaking up information like sponges. Of course later we see adults who are terrifyingly indoctrinated by “every goddamn fairy tale they read in chat rooms,” as one of the alien’s human vessels was an extremist Christian who believed that “the devil–worshipping elite” are creating “manufactured diseases” and believed herself to be one of the “pure–bred children of God.” Clark’s film manages to effortlessly touch on so many of the issues happening in America, from the COVID-19 pandemic (and extremist reactions to it), to the QAnon cult, and more. The aliens become a force for change because one of them realises how they’ve treated humans and how there must be a way forward that doesn’t involve hurting others.
The governor at the heart of the Christian cult’s anger in the film eventually admits to sexual misconduct once the alien takes over his body. He tells one of his colleagues: “I don‘t want to hurt any more people. I‘ve been treating people like food, or something—something to consume . . . I just can‘t figure out how to survive without hurting people.” While this comes from the alien within the governor, the message is about power and how we choose to wield it over those with less power, or no power at all; governors and other political leaders typically treat most citizens, particularly minorities and the lower classes, like they’re expendable, or consumable, as if they’re nothing more than commodities. The film stresses how it’s important to hold those in power accountable for the things they’ve done to hurt people, however, they’ve done enough without having to pin them to Satanic conspiracy theories that only end up hurting other people (a la Comet Pizza and Pizzagate). Often times these insane conspiracy theories only obscure the real-life issues and the real-life pain of actual victims in the name of made-up victims.

Perhaps the most important and powerful line in the film comes from the alien narrator, who’s speaking about their home planet and needing to find a way to move beyond their own tyrannical government when they say: “If we were going to survive, we had to become something new.” This quote can be read in a couple different ways. One reading is a trans allegory connected to the genderless aliens moving between bodies; trans people need to, and deserve to, “become something new” beyond their old identities in order to survive a world that is harsh and cruel to those who don’t fit properly into easily definable categories. The other is a larger reading in terms of America as a whole, in that America must “become something new”  if it’s going to survive. People can’t live according to all the rules a bunch of white slaveowners made up centuries ago; a country, like humans, has to evolve. If America can’t evolve, it is bound to atrophy, and, one day, will die. But if it can, then America, and its many diverse people will be able to survive, perhaps one day even in harmony.