Peter Wollen is well known as a film theorist, author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and the more recent Readings and Writings; and as the co-director, with Laura Mulvey, of films including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Crystal Gazing (1982). He is less known as the co-author of Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), but it is that coolly beautiful work (set in the desert heat) which comes to mind when considering Friendship's Death, Wollen's first solo venture, based on his own science fiction story. Once again, Wollen explores the isolation of the alien, and how place, or rather, misplacement, raises questions of identity and commitment. Friendship is an extraterrestrial, sent on a bungled mission to MIT that lands instead in Amman, Jordan, in the midst of the Black September riots of 1970. Friendship, looking like the lithe Tilde Swinton and thinking like a soul machine, meets the bestubbled, Hemingway-esque reporter Sullivan (Bill Patterson), by now a jaded observer of such wartorn outposts. With her curiosity and concern for the Middle East in particular, and for the question of what it means to be human in general, she brings him in from the cold. Once again, Wollen finds a moody metaphor for the mind in a motel room; he infuses understatement with intelligence, humor and a strange (that is to say, alien) kind of pathos. When Friendship leaves Sullivan with one of her memory chips, it is the true gift of oneself possible only in science fiction.