Do you remember the first time you saw the 1993 movie Coneheads? I was 10, and an avid Saturday Night Live lover, I was a big fan. Looking back, I remember the highlights: the funny aliens, Dan Aykroyd being Dan Aykroyd, the guffaw-inducing sub sandwich scene, and the honestly very good soundtrack with Soft Cell, Paul Simon, and REM.
I revisited the movie for the first time in decades this week, and I found it charming, very funny, and extremely heartfelt despite the nonstop silliness. It tells the story of two spaceship-wrecked aliens, Beldar and Prymaat, struggling to adjust to life on earth after they find out their rescue ship is nearly 20 years away.
Instead of giving in to despair and the wailing and the gnashing of (three rows!) of teeth, Beldar gets to work — first as a scrappy cab driver then as a respected driving school instructor. The plot of the movie revolves around not just Beldar and Prymaat’s settling into American life, but also the Javertian exploits of Seedling, an INS investigator who’s hot on the heels of these aliens from out of space.
It’s hard to not root for the Coneheads as they support their neighbors, build a life and family, and maintain friendships in their community. Watching the film in 2026, with the current state of our immigration policy and ICE, really brings home the fact that what’s happening now, while extremely bad, has been happening for a long time in America. Not everyone gets to choose how they get to America, and for the Coneheads, they’re literally aliens from another planet, which means there will never be a “right” way to get citizenship.
But like so many immigrants, they live and work and love in America, and in doing so become Americanized without any choice in the matter. More than any other way, they do this by consuming mass quantities of American food.
The Coneheads — all of them! — have voracious appetites. But first, why do they eat so damn much? Some quick internet research reveals theories that they have higher metabolic rates, which I suppose is as good a theory as any, considering that they’re creatures based on an old SNL sketch. There are a million things that are weird about the Coneheads, from their lack of butt cracks to the fact that their esophagus is in their skull, so the fact that the film spends so much time on their eating habits is fascinating. It’s not just the how (as it seems roughly the same way humans do) but the what. And of course, there’s definitely product placement going on here, but I’m choosing to peer a bit beyond that for the purposes of this argument.
On every shelf, every countertop, there’s piles of staple American food brands and stuffs: Twinkies, Lays, Pepsi, bacon, eggs, and more. Sitting down to have a drink? It’ll be a full six-pack for you, Prymaat says.
It’s not just food favorites, though. It’s cigarettes by the pack, cleaning fluid downed like tequila, pencil shavings delicately shorn onto plates like parmesan cheese. Occasionally some toilet paper, slurped up from across the bathroom like noodles in a ramen restaurant.
The Coneheads’ relationship with American food helps reinforce just how hard they’re trying to assimilate. But all of the non-comestible extras and the massive quantities are continual reminders that they’re not human, and that they have no access to the food culture from their home planet. Contrast this with immigrants in America who can, in good circumstances of course, often turn to specific ingredients and cultural grocery stores that provide tastes of home, even when they’re far away from the things, people, and land they hail from.
The Coneheads can’t access any of their cultural, familiar ingredients. Instead, they turn to what’s around them, enjoying what they can and starting fresh with their family in a new land.
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