Marxists at the Movies - Cocoon (1985): Literal Alien-ation

By Edward Michael Francis (they/them)

Marxists at the Movies

www.cinemarchmedia.com 

Anti-Spoiler Warning:  Spoiler warnings are like finding the fountain of youth in your swimming pool — eventually the aliens come back for it, and all you're left with is chlorine and regret... and dead grandparents. 

Cocoon has long been one of my favorite movies since I was a child.  I wasn’t supposed to like it. It was “for adults"—a movie about old people, aging, and death. But I watched it over and over as a kid, because something in it called to me. Something deep and buried. Long before I had language for autism, queerness, or being non-binary, I already knew what it meant to be unwanted by the system.

I knew what it meant to be treated like an inconvenience, a burden, something outside the story everyone else was telling. And in Cocoon, the people who were supposed to be useless—too old, too slow, too forgotten—suddenly came alive. They danced, they laughed, they swam, they loved. They mattered. I didn’t fully understand the plot, but I felt the liberation. I saw people like me—socially discarded, emotionally silenced—become the center of a new world. That hit me hard, it still does.

There's a whole academic field — critical gerontology — built around exactly this argument. Sociologist Peter Townsend named it in a landmark 1981 paper: the dependency of elderly people in the twentieth century, he argued, is being manufactured socially, and its severity is unnecessary. He called it structured dependency — not a natural consequence of aging, but the product of imposed retirement, the legitimation of low income, the denial of rights to self-determination, and the construction of services for recipients assumed to be predominantly passive. In other words, the system builds the cage and then calls it a gift.

Simone de Beauvoir had already been saying this for a decade. In The Coming of Age (1970), she argued that modern capitalist societies treat the old as "walking corpses," rather than as human beings. The moment someone enters retirement, she observed, they are viewed as unproductive waste. And in one of her most devastating lines, she wrote simply: "Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable." 

Retirees of capitalism must wrestle with questions that can lead to a crisis of confidence. If you are a worker who is no longer working, then what value, what purpose, does your life now have? Beauvoir called this the comprehensive "Othering" of the aged — and she saw it as a form of collective bad faith, where society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention.

Cocoon, made fifteen years after Beauvoir published that book and four years after Townsend named the mechanism, is a fantasy response to both of them. The pool doesn't just reverse aging — it reverses structured dependency. It restores what capitalism systematically removed: agency, passion, purpose, and the right to take up space.

I'm writing this three weeks after my father died. He retired, and roughly six months later, had his first heart attack. I don't think that was a coincidence. I think the system he'd organized his entire identity around simply stopped needing him, and his body got the memo before his mind did. He spent the next twenty-five years in physical deterioration — two more heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, diabetes, kidney disease — filling his days with YouTube, television, and the daily ritual of clearing several hundred spam emails from his inbox. He and my mother traveled the world, and that's a genuine and impressive sentence, the kind most people never get to say. But at home, he looked like a man who had lost his oars somewhere along the river of time and was just letting the current take him. I've been writing about him — about all of it — in my upcoming memoir, 7 Houses, which is about the high-control systems I've survived and the patterns I finally learned to name. His retirement, and what it did to him, fits the pattern more than I'd like. Cocoon has always moved me.

Watching it now, three weeks after standing in that ICU, I understand why differently than I ever have before. 

From Retirement to Revolution

Cocoon follows a group of elderly residents at a Florida retirement community. The retirement home itself is worth naming for what it is: a total institution, in sociologist Erving Goffman's term — a place designed not just to house people, but to manage them.

Scheduled, surveilled, stripped of autonomy. The elders don't walk next door. They trespass. That word is doing work. They are technically criminals for wanting to feel alive. Ben (Wilford Brimley), Joe (Hume Cronyn), and Art (Don Ameche)—who stumble upon a mysterious pool in a nearby house. The house has been quietly rented by a group of aliens—Antareans—led by Walter (Brian Dennehy), who are using the pool to store cocoons containing members of their species rescued from a failed mission. Worth noting: even beings from a post-capitalist civilization can't operate on Earth without first performing capitalism. They need a lease to run a rescue mission. 

When the elders begin swimming in the pool, they’re unknowingly exposed to the cocoons’ life-giving energy. Their bodies grow younger. Their spirits reignite. They rediscover joy, connection, and purpose—all things capitalism had quietly taken from them.

As their transformation deepens, a local boat captain named Jack (Steve Guttenberg) becomes entangled in the Antareans’ mission, helping them recover the cocoons and learning the truth about their presence on Earth. Jack is the film's audience surrogate and its most class-legible character: a gig worker who owns his boat but answers to whoever charters it. Petit bourgeois in the truest sense — just independent enough to feel free, just precarious enough to never actually be. Jack also begins a flirtation with Kitty (Tahnee Welch), one of the Antareans in human form, who remains largely unaffected by his awkward charm.

Eventually, the aliens offer the elders an invitation: leave Earth and join them in a life free

from aging, illness, and death. The offer itself is the film's central ideological tension: this is escape, not revolution. Emigration from a broken system rather than transformation of it. 

In the end, Cocoon becomes a story about what it means to reject a system that has already written you off.

Hollywood's Soft Touch on the Radical

Cocoon was directed by Ron Howard, just a few years out from Night Shift and still shaking off the last traces of his Happy Days innocence. The script was written by Tom Benedek, based loosely on an unpublished novel by David Saperstein — the novel had been floating around Fox since 1980, stymied by continual changes in studio administration. The "based on" credit, as I said, is doing heavy lifting. The film adaptation scrubs the novel's darker science fiction down to something palatable: a gentle alien tale dressed in family-friendly fantasy and Reagan-era sentimentality.

The road to Howard was messy. Robert Zemeckis was originally hired as director, and spent a year working on it in development. Fox executives previewed Romancing the Stone before its release in 1984 and were convinced it was a disaster — so they fired Zemeckis from Cocoon. As Zemeckis later told the Los Angeles Times, "After they saw the movie, they wanted to hire me back on 'Cocoon'. I just sort of kind of politely declined after that." Ron Howard — then thirty-one years old and still best known as Richie Cunningham — inherited the film fresh off Splash.

Howard had reservations. He admitted to being uneasy about the film's similarities to ET and Close Encounters, but he committed to a specific vision: while Fox wanted to play up the sci-fi elements, Howard stuck to his guns by keeping his focus on the eight pensioners. The result was a cast that producer Richard D. Zanuck described as having, "maybe 400 years of experience, combined." Don Ameche was 77. Hume Cronyn was 74. Jessica Tandy was 76. Directing them all was Ron Howard, a mere 31.

Howard told Mademoiselle magazine: "I'd like Cocoon audiences to have the sense that something good can be right around the corner, and can happen to you if you're ready for it. I talked to a lot of older people for this film, and they told me the same thing. You get your personality, whatever it is, early on. It doesn't alter that much over the years." It's a sweet quote. It's also, read critically, the studio-safe version of what Beauvoir and Townsend were saying: older people are not less — they were never less. The system just decided to treat them that way.

Not everything on set was harmonious. Howard later described Wilford Brimley, who was only 49 at the time and had to be aged up with dye and false liver spots, as "tough" — "I had to deal with him very differently than I dealt with anybody else, and it was sometimes unpleasant." But he also acknowledged that Brimley "elevated the tone and brought a naturalism and an honesty to Cocoon" that was exactly what the film needed. 

The numbers tell their own story. Cocoon opened on June 21, 1985 on a budget of $17.5 million and grossed $85.3 million worldwide — making it the sixth highest-grossing film of that year. For context, it was competing in a summer that included Back to the Future, which took in $210 million domestically. Cocoon was not that. But it didn't need to be. It was a phenomenon of a different kind — a film that earned its money quietly, through word of mouth, through people dragging their parents and grandparents to the multiplex, through VHS rentals that kept it circulating long after the theatrical run ended.

The critical reception was largely warm, if occasionally squeamish about the film's emotional directness. Rotten Tomatoes currently sits it at 82% Fresh, with the consensus reading: "Though it may be too sentimental for some, Ron Howard's supernatural tale of eternal youth is gentle and heartwarming, touching on poignant issues of age in the process." Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and called it "one of the sweetest, gentlest science-fiction movies I've seen, a hymn to the notion that aliens might come from outer space and yet still be almost as corny and impulsive as we are." Both Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up, praising its fresh and generous view of older people. The New York Times' Janet Maslin noted that Howard "brings a real sweetness to his subject" and praised the film's bright, expansive visual style.

The awards circuit agreed. Don Ameche took home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Art Selwyn — a win that felt, to many observers, like the industry finally paying attention to something it had been slow to see. 

Not everyone was fully on board. TV Guide called it "a gentle and effective heart-tugger" but expressed unease about Howard's vision of old age — "one in which the young cannot accept the notion of getting old." Which is, read critically, exactly the point. The discomfort some critics felt watching elderly people refuse to disappear is not a flaw in the film. It is the film working exactly as intended.

The film was produced by Lili and Richard Zanuck — a Hollywood power couple with a hand in everything from Jaws to Driving Miss Daisy. And it shows. Cocoon is polished, studio-safe, and steeped in the kind of clean production values that were standard in mid-'80s prestige sci-fi. It features a full orchestral score from James Horner — and one reason you can't stream Cocoon legally today is that the music is not currently cleared for new media or transnational sales, likely tied to rights complications following Horner's death in 2015. A film about escaping death's reach is, appropriately, tangled in its composer's estate. And just when you think the film might tip too far into the sentimental, Michael Sembello's searing club track “Gravity” kicks in — injecting pure heat into the film's most unforgettable moment.

Despite its safe trappings, Cocoon touches a nerve because it accidentally stumbles into one of its most potent metaphors: what happens to people when the system no longer finds them useful.

Alienation and the Elders: Rejecting Social Death

Under capitalism, once your labor is no longer extractable—like the elders in this film—you’re put out to pasture. Retirement is treated as one’s reward as well as your productivity funeral.  You become, in Marxist terms, "socially dead." But the moment they step into that alien-infused pool, everything changes. The pool becomes a revolutionary commons: communal, healing, unowned. No one charges admission, no one exploits it for profit, it simply is. And within it, the elders rediscover agency, desire, power, and connection.

Nowhere is that more vividly embodied than in Don Ameche’s iconic breakdancing scene.

The elders go out to a modern dance club. Art (Ameche) and Audra (Gwen Verdon) begin with a tango—refined, expected, “age-appropriate.” The crowd jeers. Then Art is overtaken by something else. He breaks, he pops and locks, he spins. He launches into full-body, floor-level breakdancing in orthopedic shoes—and he owns the room by refusing invisibility.

This is a dancing rebellion and a public refusal of decline. That performance, like the pool, reclaims the body from capital’s discard pile. It restores dignity—and that is revolutionary.

The Antareans: Post-Capitalist Care and the Moment of Infection

The aliens don’t arrive to extract or dominate. They quietly rent a house, submerge their cocoons in a pool, and begin a mission of restoration. When humans accidentally access the pool’s energy, they don’t retaliate. They simply ask: “Please don’t touch the cocoons.” Their ethic is care without control. They model a society without labor exploitation, punishment, or property. Their goal is rescue. It’s the clearest depiction of post-capitalist ethics in the film, but that utopia doesn’t stay untouched.

When the humans—curious, entitled, and careless—disturb the pool, the result is the first alien death. And Walter, the Antarean, grieves. “I’ve never known the pain.” That line is both an emotional and ideological turning point. Walter has never known grief because his society eliminated the conditions that produce it: exploitation, scarcity, disposability. But through contact with Earth—with capitalist logic—he experiences death as trauma. This is the moment of infection. The virus of capitalist indifference, the belief that all things can be used, reaches even those who have transcended it.

And yet—Walter continues. He does not become cruel. He finishes the mission and still invites others to come with them. Even wounded, he chooses solidarity over self-protection. That is radical care—an unprompted gift extended even after betrayal. The elders damage the cocoons, violate trust, and still, Walter offers them escape. That’s care at its most radical: unearned, unwavering, and extended to those who don’t deserve it, because connection matters more than punishment.

This entire ethic only works because of Brian Dennehy’s performance. Walter could’ve come off as hokey—otherworldly to the point of parody, or emotionally blank—but Dennehy plays him with stoic, alien warmth. There’s a serenity to him. A depth. He seems to exist just slightly outside of time. In anyone else’s hands the sci-fi premise might have read as hallucinogenic or absurd, but Dennehy grounds it. His Walter has a grounded charm, maybe even a little holy.

It’s a performance in the same spirit as Jeff Bridges in Starman—that delicate balancing act of portraying an alien with tenderness, clarity, and just enough emotional distance to remind you: this being is not human. But where Bridges plays wonder, Dennehy plays grace as the quiet heart of the film.

Character Studies:

Bernie and Rose: Grief as Refusal

Two of the elders, Bernie and Rose, don’t rush to the pool. But when Rose falls ill, Bernie finally brings her to the water—only to find the cocoons are gone. The magic is over, he’s too late and  Rose dies.

And when Bernie is offered the same ticket to youth and eternity the others take—he refuses. Not out of bitterness, not out of fear. Because he doesn’t want life eternal without his beloved.

Bernie’s choice is the most radical in the entire film. While the others abandon Earth, Bernie stays. He chooses memory. He chooses ending.

In a Marxist reading, Bernie becomes the conscious objector to utopia. He understands that a new world without Rose is no world at all. He bears witness to the cost and honors the pain. He is the reminder that sometimes liberation comes too late.

Jack and Kitty: Intimacy Without Ownership

Jack (Steve Guttenberg) is a dorky, horny boat guy. Kitty (Tahnee Welch) is an ethereal, ancient alien. He's clearly smitten—doing his best with every awkward charm in his arsenal—but she’s completely immune to it. She’s not flirty or coy because Kitty—she’s here for connection.

The pool scene between them is where everything flips. Instead of sex, she offers a “sharing” experience of light and energy—intimacy without physical touch, vulnerability without power games. And Jack, to his credit, doesn’t push. He just opens up and receives it.

In a Marxist reading, this moment rejects sex as transaction. It’s pleasure without labor.

Connection without conquest.

Their story asks: what if intimacy wasn’t about taking, but about witnessing? What if love didn’t need to be earned? What if the most radical thing you could do was feel someone without owning them?

And in the end, Jack’s best “O” is achieved simply by learning to exist in the same space as another—pun very much intended.

David: The Future That Watches Us Leave

Ben and Mary’s grandson David (Barret Oliver) doesn’t have a full arc. He doesn’t change the world, he doesn’t fly away with the others. His role is symbolic: he is the future the elders won’t live to see.

He is both student and witness. When his grandparents choose to leave, David jumps onto the boat as it pulls away from the dock—desperate to follow the only people who have ever shown him wonder and truth.  But Ben stops him. “You can’t go,” he says. “You’ve got to stay with your mom.” He won’t let David make the choice they’ve been forced into.

So David jumps into the ocean instead. As the boat lifts into the air, he swims away—brave and emboldened, facing the future alone. “It’s ok,” he reassures “I’m not scared, get going!”

David doesn’t inherit the revolution.He inherits the memory of it.And that matters.

In Marxist terms, David is the next generation under capitalism—the one left behind to live in the wreckage, and perhaps carry forward the stories that one day spark another rupture.

The Wives: Carriers of Grief, Memory, and Grounded Joy

While Cocoon centers its spotlight on the men—Ben, Art, Joe, and Bernie—the women who walk beside them are essential to the story’s emotional and ideological weight. Mary, Alma, Audra, and Rose are not passive companions. They are the caretakers of memory, the architects of intimacy, and the final moral anchors in a world offering magical escape.

Mary (Maureen Stapleton), Ben’s wife, is the film’s emotional core. As Ben becomes energized by the pool’s power, Mary’s response is not fear or skepticism—but watchful love. She sees the change in him. She weighs it. And ultimately, when she chooses to leave Earth with him, it’s not in pursuit of youth or eternity—it’s out of shared history. Mary is a partner until the end, even when that end disappears beyond the stars.

Alma (Jessica Tandy), Joe’s wife, has the hardest road. Joe’s transformation turns him reckless. He flirts. He strays. He lets the euphoria of youth override the integrity of their bond. Alma doesn’t melt into the background or excuse it. She confronts him. Her line—“I'm happy you're going to live, Joe, but I need to live too”—lands like a punch to the gut. She refuses to be collateral damage in his revival. Her arc is the most radical of all: a demand to matter on her own terms.

Audra (Gwen Verdon), Art's partner, is the film's unexpected firecracker. Their tango-turned-breakdance sequence is a full-bodied explosion of vitality and she matches his energy step for step. But it's the elopement reveal that shows Audra's true subversive spirit. We see them in what looks like an intimate pre-coital moment—whispering reassurances, hands touching, all romantic tension and nervous energy. Then the doors behind them open to reveal a church, a priest, the whole traditional setup. These two commitment phobes, who've spent their entire relationship dodging marriage, are finally doing it—right before they leave the planet forever. It's capitalism's cruelest joke turned inside out: the system convinced them they were too old, too set in their ways, too late for new beginnings. But faced with genuine infinity, they choose the most earthbound, conventional, beautifully human thing possible. They get married. Not because they have to, but because they finally can. That's Audra's revolution: proving that it's never too late to surprise yourself.

Rose (Herta Ware), Bernie's beloved, carries the film's most devastating truth: that liberation has a timeline, and love doesn't wait for revolution. She begins the story already unwell—her body failing under capitalism's ordinary cruelties long before the others discover their magical reprieve. When Bernie finally tries to bring her to the pool, the cocoons are gone. The commons has been destroyed. She dies from the banal violence of a system that discards the sick alongside the old. A tragic inevitability, her absence becomes Bernie's entire moral framework: the love that refuses to be consoled by fantasy, the grief that won't accept escape as victory. Rose is capitalism's final casualty and Bernie's eternal anchor—the one who reminds us that not everyone gets saved, and that matters more than who does.

Together, these four women carry the film’s deepest truths: that love outlives youth, that intimacy doesn’t fade with age, and that grief is the price of connection. They are the conscience of Cocoon.

Leaving Earth: Refusing Alienation, Winning the Oscar

In the final act, the elders are offered a choice: return to a world of decline, isolation, and decay—or leave. And they leave. Not to die, but to reject the system that erased them. They walk away from capitalist collapse and into a post-labor, post-death, post-alienation existence. They don’t escape. They reclaim.

But it’s not exactly a free choice. Capitalism backed them into a corner, forcing them to choose between agency and memory—between preserving their dignity or preserving their legacy. That’s the cruelty of the system: even the offer of liberation comes with a cost. The only way to keep living is to disappear.

And in the real world, Don Ameche’s Oscar win for this role shocked the industry. He wasn’t the frontrunner. He wasn’t in a prestige film. He was an aging actor in a sci-fi fantasy about retirement homes and aliens. But he won. For dancing. For living. For refusing to disappear. In that moment, the Academy did something accidentally radical—it honored the worker at the end of his shift. It gave the spotlight to someone the system had long discarded. And he took it—with grace, and with funk.

Conclusion: Refusing Erasure

Cocoon is an unintentional communist masterpiece about what happens when the discarded class of capitalism discovers communal healing, anti-capitalist care, and post-labor liberation — and chooses each other over a system that erased them.

Beauvoir wrote that there is only one solution to old age not becoming an absurd parody of a former life: to go on pursuing ends that give existence meaning. The elders of Cocoon do exactly that — and then some. They don't just find meaning. They dismantle the institution that was manufacturing their meaninglessness.

But Bernie stays. And Bernie is the one I keep coming back to.

Not because staying is nobler than leaving. But because Bernie's grief is specific — it has a name, a face, a woman he loved who didn't make it to the pool in time. His refusal of eternity isn't a political statement. It's just that eternity without Rose isn't eternity. It's just a very long time to be without her.

I've been thinking about my father in that hospital bed. The machines. The beeping. The moment we said turn them off, it's time. I've been thinking about what it would have meant if Walter had walked through that door instead — serene, unhurried, carrying an offer with no strings attached. No more pain. No more decline. No more of the damage that accumulated between us over decades of a relationship that was never simple and never will be.

Would he have taken it?

I think he would have. My father wanted, more than almost anything, to get back to the house. To his routines. To the ordinary texture of a life he understood. The Antarean offer isn't so different from that — it's the fantasy of continuation without cost. And he was a man who loved continuation. Who drove toward it even when the doctors said stop.

Would I have wanted him to take it?

This is the question that keeps me up. Because wanting him healed — wanting him free of pain and damage and the long weight of everything he carried — is love. But it's also, maybe, the last boundary I ever get to set. The hope that somewhere beyond the machines and the hospital and the checkered history, he finally sees me clearly. That whatever comes after strips away everything that made it hard, and what's left is just the two of us, without the wreckage between us.

I don't know if that's grief or hope or something I don't have a word for yet.

What I know is this: the elders in Cocoon get the offer because they were discarded.

Because the system used them up and left them at the margins and stopped seeing them as worth anything. And the film — accidentally, beautifully — argues that those are exactly the people who deserve a door out.

My father was complicated. He was my first bully and my father simultaneously, and I will spend a long time figuring out what to do with both of those things being true at once. But he was also old. He was also discarded. He was also a man lying in a hospital bed, his body failing, the machines breathing for him.

He deserved the offer too.

Art dances. Walter grieves. Bernie remembers. David accepts. And the rest? They leave.

My father left.

And now I’m standing on the beach, smiling at the sky.

Revolutionary Rating: ☭☭☭☭ ½  (4.5 out of 5 hammer and sickles)Not a perfect five because there’s no actual revolution—just the memory of what one might feel like.

Of course, Hollywood couldn’t leave well enough alone. Cocoon: The Return (1988) sends the elders back to Earth in a sequel so tepid it barely registers. The radicalism is gone. The politics are muddled. It’s capitalism’s favorite trick: take liberation, drain it of meaning, and try to franchise it.

The only thing worth the price of admission? Elaine Stritch. As Ruby, she delivers a performance so electric, so biting, so unmistakably Stritch, it punches through the beige fog like a Broadway spotlight. A rare film appearance and an unforgettable one. Everything else? Send it back to space.

Edward Michael Francis is the host of Marxists at the Movies and CultFroggy, both part of CineMarch Media LLC. Their upcoming memoir, 7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult, explores a lifetime of high-control systems and the long work of learning to see clearly. Support the show at patreon.com/cinemarchmedia.