I finished watching Resident Alien on Netflix and wanted to write about some of our human oddities, seen through an alien’s eyes. Harry has professional reasons for avoiding friendships: he came to Earth to wipe out humanity. A crash leaves him stranded in Colorado, where he assumes the identity of Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle and begins living among the residents of Patience. Created by Chris Sheridan, the series blends comedy, science fiction, and mystery, with Alan Tudyk playing an alien who must pass for a doctor and care for the very people he is supposed to eliminate.
I laughed a lot watching Harry try to make sense of our customs. Some of his confusion, in fact, seemed perfectly reasonable to me. We ask how people are doing and hope they won’t take too long to tell us. We ask for honesty with the answer we’d like to hear already in mind. Harry gets tripped up by these social niceties, and I’d have trouble helping him. I’d have to explain, for instance, why saying exactly what’s on his mind could mean never getting another dinner invitation.
Caring about Asta, played by Sara Tomko, complicates Harry’s plans. He wants her to be okay and discovers, to his annoyance, that this can matter more than the mission he was given. The series gives their friendship the space so many stories reserve for romance. Harry still finds humans irritating, but now there is someone among them he doesn’t want to lose.
In On Narcissism: An Introduction, Freud wrote that we must begin to love in order not to fall ill. We need to invest our psychic energy beyond the ego, in people and things that engage our interest. I read this passage and think of the pride we so often take in announcing that we need no one. The ideal of self-sufficiency seems to overlook how much we owe to the relationships that make us who we are, including those that have ended. Much of what we consider our own took shape in our relationships with other people.
That investment has consequences Harry is beginning to experience. Once someone matters to us, our well-being is no longer entirely ours to determine. An absence can spoil a day; a word can bring it back to life. Feeling loved gives us courage and also leaves us vulnerable to loss. We can be perfectly capable adults, able to handle immensely complicated matters, and still spend the afternoon waiting to hear someone’s voice.
Our preference for relationships that are easy to understand and quick to sort out echoes the demand for direct access to experience that Anna Kornbluh examines in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Her critique focuses on the devaluation of the forms of mediation through which we make sense of what we live through, such as language and the work of interpretation. We want experience to be immediately intelligible, without having to work through it. Applied to relationships, this demand leads us to expect clarity from the other person even when we aren’t clear about our own feelings.
Alain Badiou observes that we may seek out someone so much like us that the relationship allows us to remain exactly as we are. Compatibility also becomes a guarantee that we won’t have to rethink our choices. We are interested in someone as long as their desires fit our own and their presence doesn’t change the life we’ve set up for ourselves too much. This preoccupation with keeping things as they are leaves little room for deciding anything together. When we disagree, we may even accuse the other person of not knowing what they want, when what bothers us is precisely how clearly they want something that conflicts with our plans.
We come to our relationships tired, too. After a day spent solving problems and answering messages, we can care deeply about someone and still hope the conversation will be brief. Sometimes even listening asks more of us than we have to give at that moment. To call this superficial is to overlook how much of our attention work consumes, even after the workday is over. To speak of love as resistance means questioning the obligation to be constantly available for work. We need time to be together without feeling that we ought to be finishing something or getting ready for the next day.
Harry cares about Asta, but he can’t always take what she wants seriously. In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin examines the tension between needing another person’s recognition and accepting that their desires are independent of our own. We want to matter to the other person and may end up demanding that they give up something they want in order to prove it. They give in, we feel reassured, and at the next disagreement we expect the same concession. Affection coexists with a demand for submission that we struggle to recognize as our own.
Calling love a form of resistance therefore requires us to ask what we do in its name. A lasting bond can sustain care or entrench submission. We need to ask who is free to disagree, who always has to give in, and whose time is sacrificed. Recognition takes work because it involves limits: sometimes loving someone means accepting a refusal without treating it as a personal affront. At other times, it means leaving. Being willing to let another person affect us must leave room for an existence of our own.
In this sense, love can resist immediacy by making room for what we have not yet learned to do together. Picking up a conversation after an argument requires more than pouring out everything we feel. We need words the other person can take in, and some distance from our own certainty. This work of giving shape to feeling allows it to endure beyond the moment when it first took hold of us. Harry stumbles his way through lessons we sometimes assume we can skip simply because we were born here.
Loving someone does not automatically make us attentive to other people’s suffering. We can be very caring at home and indifferent to the living conditions of the people who work for us. Thinking of love as resistance therefore means examining these contradictions as well. Care can guide practical choices, such as respecting someone else’s need for rest or sharing a responsibility that always falls to them. In these situations, we begin to recognize that people we aren’t close to have the same needs that move us when we encounter them in someone we know well.
I like the irreverence with which Resident Alien questions our ability to live well. The residents of Patience try to teach Harry how to behave while stumbling through their own problems. It’s fun to watch them interact, partly because fiction gives us an outside view of behavior we would probably defend in all seriousness if the conversation were about us. The alien gives us a chance to question explanations we have repeated for years without giving them much thought.
Harry arrives with firm opinions about humans and ends up having experiences he cannot make sense of with what he knows. He may know our anatomy and still have no idea why he misses someone. His friendship with Asta leaves him worrying about things that interfere with his plans, and his intelligence is little help when he has to admit he’s afraid of losing her. I see him becoming human as he learns to care. A life he once considered expendable comes to occupy his thoughts and influence his decisions, even when it would be more convenient to carry on with the mission.
Among our human oddities, I would find it hard to explain to Harry the pride we take in learning to do without one another. As he says goodbye to Earth, he speaks of love while we watch people reach out to help others, even strangers. That sequence leaves me thinking about how much we still have to learn from something we are already capable of doing. We admire these gestures; the suggestion that care should shape how we live as a society tends to elicit the condescending smile we reserve for the naive. Understanding how the world works should help us recognize what we can change. How much suffering do we continue to accept as inevitable because addressing it would require us to rethink our priorities?
References
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. Pantheon Books.
Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 73–102). Hogarth Press.
Kornbluh, A. (2024). Immediacy, or the style of too late capitalism. Verso.
Petitjean, C. (2014, April 14). Alain Badiou: “People cling onto identities… it is a world opposed to the encounter”. Verso.
Sheridan, C. (Executive Producer). (2021–2025). Resident Alien [TV series]. Universal Content Productions; Amblin Television; Dark Horse Entertainment.
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