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“My mother told me that there are no monsters… no real ones. But; there are!”
Shifting Gender in the Alien Films.
Alien exploded onto cinema screens in 1979, establishing an innovative, yet timely category of hero, embodied by the extraordinary Ellen Ripley, who emerges stealthily from the background to boldly face the enemy as reluctant protagonist, and then goes on, to have a more than significant impact on viewers for another three Alien films culminating in 1998 with Alien Resurrection. This saga was to transform Ellen Ripley into one of the most outstanding and influential film heroes of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Ripley’s story can be read as an allegory of humanities spiritual evolution. Beginning with human awakening through the confrontation in the primeval murkiness, the battling with the monsters from primeval chaos, “which although threatening to “destroy life also help to define life.” This is followed by the ensuing sacred impregnation of the earth goddess, Ripley, by the seed of the god of heaven, the archaic mother/ the alien queen, and the creation, through fusion, of a higher deity, and the final destruction of the nether monsters of the soul. But, somehow, there seems to be more to what has become the Ripley “legend.” This new class of superwoman has forged a wedge assaulting the dominant patriarchal paradigm, creating her own mythology.
“My mother told me that there are no monsters… no real ones. But; there are!” These first words heard in Alien Resurrection, are the resurrected Ripley’s initial embryonic thoughts/memories as “she” is developing in a giant test tube that exposes the sordid face of humanities hubristric nature. This, the final film in the Alien saga, opens with the evil of the monstrous medusa, “archaic mother” embodied in the alien creatures having been replaced by the evil demigod biotechnology. A twist of company controlled “fate” results in the transference of overt evil from the amoral alien monsters to the immoral monstrous company agents. The representatives of the company system expose their moral code through a vile callousness toward Ripley and the alien queen. The latest genetically engineered Ripley, Number 8, echoes the incredulous words of Newt, her adopted child in Aliens, “My mother told me that there are no monsters… no real ones, but there are!” But unlike Newt, who is referring to the monstrous alien creature, Ripley, Number 8, uses these words in reference to her monstrous human creators. Ripley’s spiritual evolution into hybrid alien/Ripley clone with a repulsion of humanity is a result of the corruption of a number of, specifically company controlled, characters throughout all the Alien films. Characters programmed by the corruption of the company and/or corrupted themselves by ambitions they set before themselves, ambitions concerned with greed, wealth, and power creating an identifiable link with patriarchy through the imperialism of the company.
The final image and/or sound concluding the first three movies refer back to the cryogenic capsules, which suggest Ripley’s containment within the company network, emphasising the sense that everything that enters the computer systems is being sent back to the company for assimilation. Ellen Ripley’s voice can be heard at the end of Alien III as she signed off from Alien from the Nostromo, further indicating Ripley’s repression within the company matrix. Nostromo, the spaceship in Alien, a direct reference to Joseph Conrad through his notable novel Nostromo (1904), a story of revolution, politics, corruption and financial manipulation in an anonymous South American republic. This in itself is a pointer to company corruption and the horror of pervading colonialism/imperialism as well as to the protagonists growing disillusionment with humanity, and a looming ubiquitous insanity. Themes running through Conrad’s work include the horror of an all-consuming passion for power and worlds filled with “a choice of nightmares” exuding a creeping madness that infects all. Ripley’s observation of brooding evil throughout the Alien films increases her disillusionment with humanity revealing and developing her intrinsic connection to the monstrous alien. Like, Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ripley journeys to the deepest space of her soul and is forced to face both the “monster” without and the “monster” within. Ripley comes to know the alien monster better than she knows herself, eventually becoming the embodiment, a human replica, of it.
At the start of each of the fist three Alien movies, Ripley, although a fiercely independent and self-sufficient woman, constantly has to prove herself to the male characters, being mocked in Alien, diagnosed as insane in Aliens, the outsider in the male prison in Alien III, and a prisoner/freak in Alien Resurrection. She does not even appear to be the protagonist for the first half of the first film, Alien, the viewer being given no tangible cues to identify with Ripley or to assume her latent heroism. It is not until the scene when she enters the womb of the computer “mother” and the ensuing confrontation with the male android, “other” Ash that her true calling begins to unfold. Each of the first three films begin with the men looking upon her as “only a Woman,” even Ash is aware of this and uses it to undermine Ripley’s authority in Alien. By Alien Resurrection, Ripley is now subject to the gaze of the male scientists, but as the feared “other” and despite being imprisoned, her growing “wholeness” is now more evident and appears to be beyond subjugation. The story of the recreated Ripley, number 8, goes beyond Ripley facing her worst nightmares. She has sacrificed herself seemingly in vain, she has been resurrected, she is now the mother of the monster she lived her life to destroy, but she is not Ellen Ripley. Ellen Ripley died 200 years ago, Number 8 is a genetically engineered test-tube creation, but paradoxically she is Ripley reborn. The scientist and the General refer to her as it or the thing, “why does it have memories?” is the question asked by General Ferez. Ripley’s consciousness wakens with the inherited, residual memory of both Ripley and a fragment of the alien consciousness. The alien’s DNA has enhanced Ripley’s senses, instincts, and strength; she is now a super human/alien. Ripley is now directly aligned with both humanity and the other. In Alien Resurrection for the first time, Sigourney Weaver’s full height is shown off and Ripley appears to have physically grown. To emphasise this Sigourney is shot with low angle shots, she never slouches, as she did in the earlier films, and is played against Winona Ryder. However, Ripley is not complete. She must first face the alien queen, accept her love, watch her die and destroy the beast before reaching completion or wholeness. As she nears her completion the queen cradles Ripley in her arms, mothering her own mother. The queen shows maternal love for Ripley and then makes her watch her daughter, the alien queen; give birth to a hybrid beast. Ripley watches in horror as the child rejects and murders its natural birth mother and chooses Ripley. Making Ripley the object of a kind of fractured Oedipal love, but she must destroy this clinging child, the progeny of the company and the dominating patriarchal in order to break the dominant paradigm of her and our society.
Among the many themes running through the Alien films is the figurative growth of Ripley as a representation of the evolution of feminism throughout the late twentieth century… Ripley must grow beyond patriarchy’s embedded boundaries in order to gain any recognition within the patriarchal framework of western society. She must become a whole woman, who accepts both the masculine side of her nature and the archaic feminine that resides within her as the essence of her being. The archaic Mother, like the alien creature, being ubiquitous, mutable, and unpredictable, transcends specificity, and sexuality, producing everything, inexhaustibly, from herself. Early feminists had a strong need to reject the fetishised symbol of woman created by the patriarchal paradigm but in doing sometimes rejected everything feminine, thus sometimes throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water. Ripley as a representative of the “new woman” cannot deny the female within, the archaic mother that has been represented as the monstrous feminine by a paranoid male hierarchy throughout the centuries. Ripley must face the monster and realise it is a part of her self; it is what makes her who she is, woman. By facing and accepting the monster within, Ripley evolves into a whole; she becomes a super being, comfortable with both the yin and yang of her nature.
To attain this, Ripley must; become the heroic lone human survivor of Alien. She must then play happy, fractured nuclear families while merging with technology to defeat the alien in Aliens, become the masculinized, sexually active, alien impregnated, martyr in Alien III, and be converted into the resurrected saviour, hybrid super being, mother of both the female android Call and the hybrid beast in Alien Resurrection. These trials and battles channel Ripley’s journey through the nether reaches of her soul tying the sexual and the sacred. Creed and Kristeva attest that “through ritual, the demarcation lines between the human and non human are drawn up” In the article Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection, Creed discusses the links between “the nature of femininity, abjection and the sacred.” She goes on to say “the ultimate in abjection is the corpse” but Ripley’s abjection goes beyond even the corpse to resurrection. It is not until Ripley reaches perfect abjection, accepting her fate at the end of Alien III that she is able to move forward and look out, towards a new hope at the end of Alien Resurrection.
In Alien Resurrection, Ripley is a genetically manufactured, hybrid clone, the human face of the monstrous-feminine; she is now the monster’s mother. The created Ripley is a half-breed, a fusion of human and alien genes. Like the alien queen, Ripley has always had a strong maternal instinct, manifesting first in visual matches linking her to the alien queen, this is amplified through her attachment to the cat in Alien, Newt in Aliens and Call in Alien Resurrection and by her impregnation by an alien in Alien III. This impregnation makes her host to the alien queen, creating a unity between Ripley, and the castrating woman and archaic mother through her alien progeny. Sexuality and the presence of the archaic mother is signalled throughout all the Alien films, via the imagery of the mise-en-scene, such as the womblike interior of the spacecrafts, the alien’s nests, the prison tunnels, and the ejection of bodies and smaller spacecraft from large spacecraft throughout the films.
“Raymond Bellour maintains that in the nineteenth century men looked at women and feared they were different, but in the twentieth century men look at women and fear they are the same.” Penley argues in her article Time Travel, Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia, that there has been a loss of sexual difference evident in contemporary classic film. She also argues that this is evidenced in Ridley Scott’s Alien, in that the alien creature is seen as the embodiment of sexual difference in the representations of the difference between human and other. The alien as other and a symbol of female reproduction glorifies the reproductive attributes of woman at the expense of her femininity and completeness of personality. Like fertility symbols dating back to Palaeolithic times the fetishised representation of the fertile, reproductive woman, is seen as necessity for the continuation of the species, and is both venerated and feared. “In this respect, it could be well maintained that it is woman’s sexuality, that which renders them desirable – but also threatening – to men, which constitutes the real problem that the horror cinema exists to explore, and which constitutes also and ultimately that which is really monstrous.” The female has been feared because of her power, the power to reproduce, because of the menstrual blood, a symbol of fertility, and because she has been perceived as the phallic mother, the archaic mother, and vagina castrates/vagina dentata castrator of the male. The alien queen, being the embodiment of these personas, is either a self-fertilising protandrous hermaphrodite, capable of producing both sperm and eggs or parthenogenetic, capable of producing eggs that develop without fertilization. She is the embodiment of Barbara Creed’s definition of the “monstrous-feminine” and presents the ultimate threat to the company with its order and ultimately the male because she has no need for him. She contains the creation qualities humanity strives to attain through science.
Throughout time, the archaic mother has been represented as castrator in mythology. “In classical art the figure of a beautiful woman was often accompanied by an animal companion with open jaws and snapping teeth: the creature represented her deadly genital trap and evil intent.” A beautiful and/or innocent woman accompanied by a ferocious beast is thus seen as both sexually dangerous and in danger. Ripley becomes both. The alien creature has accompanied Ripley, throughout the Alien films, for so long that by Alien III she cannot remember a time without it and she is becoming the gorgon, which brings death to those that look upon her. In Alien, however, the cat, Jonesy, also accompanies Ripley. The cat, in Alien, as the representation of the domestication of this dangerous sexuality, is thus rightly left behind in Aliens. Ripley’s return for Jonesy at the end of Alien, is both an indicator of Ripley’s tamed, sexual domesticity, her compliance to the company as representative of the patriarchal order, and is an especially important as a sign of her dormant maternal instinct. The cat is an important symbol of “the edge of domesticity,” the domestication of the wild and the “other”; as such Ripley’s domesticated cat acts as a sign for both, her latent sexuality and as an analogy and a foil for the alien creature. Cats with their nine lives, sixth sense for danger, ability to land on their feet and close association with witches as familiars retain a canny wildness even after domestication. The alien creature, however, with its canny wildness cannot be tamed. It is more like a big cat and is likened to a lion after the zebras in Alien III, with one of the prisoners calling “here kitty, kitty” through the dark fallopian tunnels as he is attempting to lure the creature into their trap. The cuts between the cat and the alien creature in Alien, like the cuts between Ripley and the alien are indicators of the link between the three as “other,” those outside the constraints of the company’s order. At first, Ripley is more like the pet cat, Jonesy, she is domesticated but canny, but by the time she is leaving to investigate the problems at the colony in Aliens, her dormant wildness and independence is rising within her. She is developing into a dangerous woman, perilous for the dominant patriarchal paradigm embodied by the company. The untameable wildness is yet again referred to in Alien Resurrection, with Ripley’s scornful look after the scientists tell her that they are taming both the alien and her. By this time, Ripley has become the embodiment of otherness, her actions, and physical movements reflecting those of a trapped wild animal. She has recognised the wild archaic mother within her and is learning to accept her.
Ripley is one of the first true female Hollywood hero; she stands out as a woman who does not use her feminine “wiles” to get her way, even her question in Alien Resurrection, “who do I have to fuck to get off this ship?” is a rhetorical irony. Throughout the Alien films, Ripley continues, against all odds, to single-mindedly perform the almost super human feat of fighting for justice taking “the high moral ground” and destroying the enemy. This is, according to Virginia Bennett, the typical “trait shared by the historical or fictitious women warriors in literature.” “Rocking the Cradle and Wielding the Sword” this dual image of woman often results in death for the warrior women who comprise it. Ripley is doomed, and although she is martyred in Alien III, hers is the death of a deliverer, a saviour, a Christ, and/or Anti-Christ figure. Regardless of burning being the traditional fate of the witch or revolutionary and freedom fighter, Ripley makes the decision to die in the cleansing, purifying fire. This is an enlightened transcendence into the refiner’s fire, which removes the dross to reveal purity and clarity. Despite being further objectified after her resurrection, literally becoming “a piece of meat,” Ripley continues to rise above her circumstances. She accepts who she is, what she is, and never stoops to the level of those who sell their souls to the company she never kills a human. Ripley’s whole story is echoed in Alien Resurrection through the tiny female android, Call, who is on a mission to destroy Ripley and the aliens. But, Call too is an outsider, or “other,” who must face and accept Ripley in order to face the beast. As representations of “otherness” as the symbol of the feminine, both Ripley and Call have to come to terms with their perceived monsters. It is not until they do this, that they can be whole and present hope for the future. By the end of Alien Resurrection both have reached a degree of wholeness and in the final scene Call, is filmed in such a way that she appears to have grown to match Ripley, emphasising the correlation between the two.
Aliens and Alien Resurrection
Aliens and Alien Resurrection
Conrad, p.127, Heart of Darkness.
Creed, in Alien Zone, p.8
ibid
Creed, p.9
Penley, p124.
Creed, p.5
Creed, p.108,
Islam, p.106
Bennett, Significant Others, p.6
Krieenghkraipetch, Significant Others, p.31
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burgwinkle William, Man Glenn & Wayne Valerie; Significant Others: gender and Culture in Film and Literature East and West; Selected Conference Papers, College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, Uni of Hawaii & the East West Centre, 1993.
Bennett Virginia, Women warriors and Nationalism: Two Cases in Point, in Significant Others ; Significant Others: gender and Culture in Film and Literature East and West; Selected Conference Papers, College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, Uni of Hawaii & the East West Centre, 1993.
Conrad Joseph; Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether;
Penguin Books, England, 1995.
Creed Barbara; The Monstrous Feminine in Alien Zone. Edited by A. Kuhn.
Lon: Verso 1990.
Islam, Needeya; “I Want to Shoot People:” Genre, Gender and Action in the Films of Kathryn Bigelow in Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema of the Moment. Laleen Jayamanne ed Sydney Power Pubs 1995.
Kriengkraipetch Suvanna; Women Warriors: Dual Images in Modern Thai Literature in Significant Others, Selected Conference Papers, College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, Uni of Hawaii & the East West Centre, 1993.
Kuhn Annette; Alien Zone; Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London : verso, 1990
Neale S; “You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding!” Knowledge, Belief and Judgement in Science Fiction, in Alien Zone. Edited by A. Kuhn. Lon: Verso 1990.
Penley Constance, Time Travel: Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia in Alien Zone. Ed by Annette Kuhn. Lon : verso, 1990
Sobchack V; The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex & the Science Fiction Film, in Alien Zone. Edited by Annette Kuhn. Lon: Verso, 1990, pp. 103-115
Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD ROM Version, EB2, CD 2, 1995.
FILMOGRAPHY
Alien Ridley Scott, U.S.A., 1979
Aliens James Cameron, U.S.A., 1986
Alien III David Fincher, U.S.A., 1992
Alien Resurrection Jean-Pierre Jeunet, U.S.A., 1998
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