"Comin' To Getcha - Again"
Sylvia Kelso
Alien 3, 20th Century Fox, Directed by David Fincher, Released 1992.
There is good news and bad news from Hollywood's latest venture into outer
space, when the third-time survivor Ripley battles her equally tenacious alien
on an isolated all-male prison colony. The best is that they've finally nailed
the monster, permanently. The worst is that the patriarchy got Ripley while
they were doing it.
Some good news is that Charles Dance makes a suitably sinister if too
briefly present ruined medico, and Sigourney Weaver provesfemale looks can
survive a crewcut and spacer's Jackie Howe, but otherwise, the news is bad.
Partly this comes from a sense of ideological regression, but mostly from a
dispiriting lack of originality. In horror films, third time does not, as Sam once
told Gollum, pay for all, but in this case provides an object lesson on the sin of
sequel-making. Alien (1979) was a stunning new variant of the SF/horror film,
combining the monster of fifties SF films like The Thing (1951) (Nagl, 267)
with the machine-wars theme that pitted humans against "computers and
robots" (Fitting, 285) and became a staple of the eighties in films like The
Terminator (1984) and in the SF video industry. Riding the SF boom of films
like Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Alien was
also what Manfred NagI calls a "New Hollywood" blockbuster (268), a
complete media package with elaborate special effects, $30 million budget,
expensive pre-release publicity, spin-off subsidiary marketing, and, unlike the
later Dune (1984), huge box-office success. It also generated critical interest,
from a major psychoanalytic reading in Screen (Creed, 1986) to a Marxist
symposium whose papers were published in Science Fiction Studies (November,
1980). But its notable features did not end with the generation of a scene, at the
first "alien birth", that drew horror addicts like flies, that left the
participant actors screaming and may well become a classic to rival the shower
scene in Psycho. Taking up the allusion to Conrad in the ship's name, Nostrorno,
the film was a trend-maker in its conscious anti-capitalism.
In this Alien drew upon the seventies theme of machine-wars, the sense of
technology as an image of the individual's suppression or alienation in later
capitalism, a protest expressed in horror novels like Dean Koontz's Night
Chills (1977) as well as in films like Logan's Run (1976). Peter Fitting sees this
element in the film as obscuring "the actual commodification and alienating
effects of late capitalism" (288), behind an attack on socialist regimes and
Third World economic threats to the "lifeboat" of the American industrial
economy. I consider that Alien actually comes closest to resisting this
deflection, to blaming the capitalist subject's ills squarely on the system itself,
even if it then resolves the contradiction by what Fitting calls "the victory of a
new and enlightened capitalism" (289), an individual's triumph over the
threat of both Third World aliens and alienating technology. I would actually
see this as a reversion to what Raymond Williams called a narrative sediment,
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an attempt to solve the problems of post-modern capitalism through the
outmoded paradigm of the integrated and independent individual.
Nevertheless, the attempt at anti-capitalism gave a new twist to the
horror film, where, Stephen Neale says, "The monster ... is always that which
disrupts and challenges the definitions of the 'human' and the 'natural" (8).
Fitting set up Greimas' semantic rectangle for Alien on this very opposition, but
argued that the fourth term, the synthesis of the machine and the non-human,
was missing. I would argue that it was very significantly present but absent, in
the shape of the Company. Who could forget the frisson, so much more chilling
than the blood and gore of the alien's eruption from Kane's stomach, when
someone remarks casually that "The company must want it (the alien) for the
weapons division"? If, as some critics consider, the alien is progressively
humanised, the corporate greed, callousness and stupidity progressively
revealed in the crew's betrayal makes the android Ash the perfect symbol of
the minds behind his orders, the synthesis of machine and non-human that
constitutes the capitalist monster itself: the Company. In siting the "human"
crew between the alien and this second monster, Alien did indeed disrupt and
challenge the definition of humanity. It created a double tension between what
exactly is monstrous and what exactly is human that becomes one of the most
powerful elements in the film.
In Alien's wake blame-the-corporation became a formulaic norm into the
late eighties, from films like Wall Street (1987) and Pretty Woman (1990) to
SF novels like Robert Heinlein's Friday (1982) and Sheri Tepper's The Enigma
Score (1987). In 1979, the other state-of-the-art variant was that third
deviation from normative male white "humanity", Ripley herself. If feminism
had by then sunk from media notice, popular literature was making its strongest
positive response, from feminist Utopias like McKee Charnas' Motherlines
(1978) to male attempts at accommodating femjnism as in Dean Koontz's
Whispers (1980) and John Varley's Titan (1979). Alien fits neatly into this
stance, combining, as Judith Lowder Newton remarked, the sediment of
nineteenth century ideology that saw women as society's moral rescuers with
the Utopian feminist stance that "women, white middle-class women, will
make it better" (294), yet expressing male and capitalist anxieties about
feminism, and with it, "the sexual rage and terror" (295) which, as Barbara
Creed reads it, is directed at the Alien as archaic and devouring mother, or
woman-as-mother, or woman as a whole.
With the first two Alien films as with that other mainstream attempt at a
"woman's film", Thelma and Louise (1991) I find myself as a feminist
confronting the dilemma of the half-full or half-empty glass. On the one hand,
from inside patriarchal discourses, Alien can be convincingly read as a case of
gynophobia, as Creed does. On the other hand, this ignores Ripley's very
presence, the enormous step forward in creating a female hero instead of a
female victim or even, as in Star Wars, a Princess stereotype, and all the quasifeminist elements of this presentation. She is neither a victim nor a token
woman nor a love-interest. Stephen Neale remarks that "the narrative process
in horror films tend [sic] to be marked by a search for that discourse, that
specialised form of knowledge which will enable the human characters to
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comprehend and control" (8) the monster. In Dracula this discourse is provided
by Van Helsing, the arch-father. But here, where the Company's perfidy
removes all hope of an authoritative patriachal discourse, it is Ripley who
steps into Van Helsing's shoes, albeit as a Cassandra whose warnings go
unheard until too late. But then she steps from Van Helsing's shoes into those of
Beowuif. If she salvages only herself, nevertheless, like Sarah in The
Terminator, she battles the monster without male assistance or rescue - and
she wins. It is Ripley who finally "blows the alien devourer out of the goddanm airlock, into the deepest reaches of the unconscious" (Goodall, 82). If she
must then cast herself on the mercy of the Company for retrieval, is the glass
half-empty or half-full?
Creed argues that seen through patriarchal discourses Alien "tells us
nothing about feminine desire in relation to the horrific" (70). Applying a less
aridrocentric and universalising psychoanalytic model like Nancy Chodorow's
construction of the white Western middle-class feminine personality, it is still
possible to read the Alien as archaic and devouring mother. But it can now be
doubled or split with the computer, Mother, from whose ship-womb Ripley
first came. The closure then enacts the female subject's separation from her
"mother", a separation which under patriarchal distortion become the
"murder" of both mothers, symbolically performed in many female Gothic
novels, and here inscribed as desire rather than consummation, since the
destruction only takes Ripley back to the womb of cryo-sleep. But even this
reading erases historic specificity and ideological content. I ended by concurring
with Lowder Newton, in a Marxist-feminist reading that sees the Alien as the
focus of male terrors, and Ripley as a simultaneous Utopian wish-fulfilment
and ideological repression of male AND feminist desires for women, who in
assuming her heroic individual role lost what Lowder Newton called her
collective "radical thrust" (297). The glass was both half-empty and half-full.
Though it generated nowhere near the critical interest, with Aliens (1986)
Ridley Scott's successor James Cameron managed a good-enough variation.
There was the same stark setting, great - in both senses - play on blue spotlit
spaces between massive girder frames, the same isolated capsule of Companybetrayed outpost where human and monster fight it out. A more present
portrayal of capitalist perfidy in the Company man who tries to feed Ripley to
the alien is coupled with a nasty new variation on the monster-menace: getting
eaten alive is no longer the worst thing that can happen. You can be left alive
for baby food. The same Cassandra role for Ripley is extended as gung-ho
militarism takes a bath along with capitalism. Elsewhere, Ripley advances
from mother-of-cat to mother-of human-daughter, whom she defends against
the alien Mother. Will Wright finds the role of child-defender taken in
Westerns by male heroes (46), so it can be seen as another step into heroic male
shoes. But the Alien's now indubitable biological femaleness and her mother
role confirmed Creed, Lowder Newton and Linda Bundtzen in their reading of
its mouth as a monstrous vagina den tata, and identified the "phobic impetus of
the second film as intrinsically masculine" (Goodall, 75). This is accentuated in
the final battle, when Ripley's "Get away from her, you bitch!" erased the
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human/alien dichotomy, and reduced her and the Alien to two maternal
animals fighting for the survival of their young.
On the other hand, Ripley as mother remains Ripley as warrior, and
Ripley as wise-adviser. She still fights the Alien off without male assistance,
takes the commander's role, and is not a token woman in the company. This time
the second woman was the female marine who both male and female spectators
described to me as the "best" character in the film. "You ever been mistaken for
a man, Vasquez?" asks a male marine. "No," she retorts. "Have you?" That
this ancient jibe at a woman's femininity is redirected as a laugh against the
man spells out the film's endorsement of Vasquez as a warrior who also keeps
her womanl-iood. If she dies as a warrior-hero, if the closure again shows
Ripley casting herself upon the Company's waters, and even at the hub of a
conventional nuclear family - male, female, child - Ripley and Vasquez
between them supply a strong counter-balance to the deepening gynophobia
around the Alien, and for 1986, an unconscionably positive attitude to the
female hero. The glass was, perhaps, a little over half-full.
Alien 3 proves the fidelity of Hans Gerhold's 1980 prophecy for SF
blockbuster:
[S]uch costly investments lose the "experimental" and thus possibly
innovative character of entertainment movies
one falls back upon
familiar material and reproduces traditional models, cliches and
stereotypes, until these reproduce themselves in dizzying succession
(Cited Nagi, 272)
...
Humour, innovation, chutzpah and rebellion are alike absent from Alien 3 .
Barren white rooms and labyrinthine tunnels were all right once, all right
twice with variations, but the third time round grimy steel girders and iron
labyrinths provoke something more like boredom. Doesn't a galactic Company
own any up-market premises? And couldn't the film have sought originality in
other areas? Alien and Aliens rely on a distancing effect for their horror, as in
the old Gothic novels, where the action occupies some site so remote the
audience will accept anything. "In space," said that memorable first blurb, "noone can hear you scream." But as Katherine Spencer pointed out, in what she
calls Victorian urban Gothic, as in Stephen King's novels, "the supernatural
terrors
derive much of their emotional power from the fact that they are
happening here, now, next door
(95). Alien 3 could have made Ripley's
landfall on some sybaritic planet, and scarified capitalism in earnest by gutting
company directors in Future-palatial boardrooms. It could even have
threatened Earth. This, of course, would require not only an elastic imagination
but an SF writer's know-how and enthusiasm for logistic plausibility; and a lot
bigger budget than the $18 million needed for those tunnels and girders, so
reminiscent of the basement-sale sets that used to appear in Doctor Who and
Blake 7, when planets touched only by Tardis were represented by half a
quarry and a couple of all-white interiors.
This imaginative poverty tries to reproduce the Company as villain, for
popular film and fiction a choice now long passe. The relentless demands for
...
..."
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perpetual originality within a needle's eye of formulaic expectations require
new villains, and the moment of anti-system clarity enunciated by Alien was
quickly obscured, a process helped by the political swing to conservatism. By
1984 horror writers like Dean Koontz have succumbed to the precise xenophobia
found by Peter Fitting in Alien, with a cop hero defending the NYPD's probity,
and a Haitian voodoo priest for villain (Darkness Comes, 1984). As something
of a pit-canary on intra-systemic threats to the status quo, Koontz's The
Servants of Twilight (1984) anticipated women writers who have chosen to
target corrupt evangelists, as in Katherine Harvey's best-seller Butterfly
(1988), or religious fanaticism, as in Raising the Stones (1990), whose author,
Sheri S. Tepper, has already abandoned this target as well. For Alien 3,
religion is a topic that, like Pope's well-bred spaniels, the film mumbles
civilly but dares not bite. The male, mostly black prisoners are shown as a
community united by their religious sect. At the Alien's first onslaught,
however, their fragile amity crumbles in recriminations, mutiny, attempted
rape and/or bashing of Ripley, and a tepid reply to the minister/leader's
heroic demand that they die fighting rather than sitting on their butts. Like
the threat of the Company, the religious revival remains a topic undeveloped,
neither good nor bad, just largely irrelevant.
Worse is the problem of overkill: everybody knows the Alien's habits now,
and advance retrospection becomes a disadvantage when you lack the
imagination to capitalise on it. In Aliens the twist was the fate worse than
eating. In Alien 3 we're back to direct consumption. And there is a limit to the
number of times you can watch a shot of black fangs and some hapless mortal's
boots kicking in mid-air, or follow the game of ten little cosmonauls down
claustrophobic passages, before having to stifle, not a scream but a yawn. Even
the tag-game in the closing stages of Alien 3 was predictable, while the
venture into Alien-cam merely told my pedantic SF reader's brain that Aliens
see, disappointingly, in binocular colour just like human beings. The only
genuine thrills were the Alien's attack on the Sulaco's escape capsule, superbly
sandwiched among the opening credits, and the scene in the infirmary when,
having munched the degenerate doctor, the Alien sniffs/ tastes/ touches
Ripley's cheek - and goes away.
That was the signal to alert watchers that something is badly wrong with
our Believe-it-or-not heroine, something doubtless intended as the ultimate
horror, but to me more suggestive of a dull imagination fed by reactionary
ideology. This time the glass is definitely more than half-empty, and it is the
more dispiriting because several branches of popular fiction have continued to
construct a tradition of strongwomen characters. Detective writers like Sarah
Paretsky and Sue Grafton, fantasists like Judith Tarr and in her latest novel,
Ursula Le Gum, SF writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and C.J. Cherryh,
fantasy! SF/ horror writers like Sheri S. Tepper, present women as fighters,
women as heroes, women as mothers and heroes, women who, even more than
Vasquez, have both power and femaleness. In Tehanu (1991) Le Gum
overthrows the male magic of her famous Earthsea trilogy and saves her
archmage through the agency of a dragon's daughter, an abused and mutilated
female child. In Barravar (1990) Bujold brings down an empire and executes a
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military dictator through two women who restore each other's children. Alien 3
degrades Ripley to the oldest patriarchal role for women. She becomes a foetus
carrier, an Alien's incubator.
Of itself this throws the film back into that postwar and particularly male
paranoia of miscegenation evident in novels like Wyndham's The Midwich
Cuckoos (1957), or the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), where women are again the
passive incubators of Aliens the men must imperatively destroy: somebody'sknocked-up-my-woman-and-I-don't-think-it-was-me. If Alien stripped Ripley
to reveal "a long and lovingly-recorded expanse of marvellous body" (Lowder
Newton, 295) that Creed saw as representing "the normal mother" giving
reassurance after the death of the archaic maternal murderess, Aliens inscribed
that female body in her robotic fork-lift suit as a worker, as an active male
equal, as, eventually, a super-human armoured hero. In Alien 3 it becomes the
focus for images of penetration and impregnation. The Alien cracks open the
capsule in space, there are internal scan shots of it "in utero"; there are
repeated shots of Ripley being given an injection, exploiting needle-phobia, but
also implying penetration; breaking the celibate austerity of Alien, she goes to
bed with the doctor who injected her. Her re-inscription as instrument rather
than agent is repeated by the second scan of the Alien "in utero", and by
Ripley's own words, when she tells her would-be rescuers, "I felt it move."
A phrase applied with joy to a human embryo is doubtless meant to deepen
the ultimate horror of alien invasion, incubation not in a man or a helpless
captive, but in the series' female hero. But this "pregnancy" disjoints the
discourses of gender and human/alien difference, for if Ripley is carrying a
monster, does she not become a monster herself? And as Rebecca Bell-Metereau
argues, in the male-dominated world of SP Ripley is already what I have
called a deviation, a doubtful human. To develop the pregnancy motif and
have the Alien acknowledge her "maternity" is to exacerbate the existing
tendency to read woman as human monster. She is not-dead among the capsule
casualties, she is this time the only woman, not-man among the male prisoners,
and despite her inscription as fellow prisoner with shaved head and prison
clothes, she remains a sexual disrupter, and even a literal bringer of death.
This is to regenerate the long SF tradition that, like most psychoanalytic
theory, has de-humanised women, seeing them as Other, not-man, monster,
alien. It also aligns the film with the current reactionary trend. There is an
equally long horror tradition that positions women as helpless victims, and
from seeing women not as fellow warriors but as helpless carriers of the Alien's
foetus it is an easy step to the old Judaeo-Christian double shuffle of, "She got
pregnant, she's a victim, she's to blame." In Alien 3 this whisper also rises from
the background, a disquieting counterpoint to meditations on a Right-to-Lifer's
stance on this pregnancy. The arch dissector of discourses remarked that
discourse "transmits and produces power
but also undermines and exposes it"
(Foucault, 101). Getting Ripley pregnant to an alien re-inscribes her as a
passive female, but also undermines a leading element in reactionary,
patriarchal discourse. How do you tell this woman that this embryo also has a
"choice" and a "right to life"?
...
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There is a fetishistic disavowal of this problem which becomes irony in
making the Company's final tempter the inventor and double of the android
Ash. Of Ash the Company Satan and Ripley the Alien mother, which is truly
not-human, which is truly man and not-man? But there is no doubt about the
patriarchal terms of his offer to Ripley. "We can get it out" he tells her. "You
could have children." Not "You could have your job back:" this offer is strictly
of an eighties, post-feminist, post-Bush woman's life. Company villainy and
patriarchal ideology emerge yet more feloniously in his unguarded final
protests, "You can't take such a magnificent specimen away from me!" As was
doubtless intended, it is not difficult to extrapolate a further horror where the
Company keeps Ripley alive until the Alien "comes to term", a truly
patriarchal nightmare of the fate worse than death.
Ripley's "pregnancy" implies the Alien films' final fall into patriarchal
and phallocentric phobias. In Jane Goodall's terms, her death states
definitively that the only permanent way to blow the Alien from the deeps of
the unconscious is to blow the subject away too. This pessimistic conclusion
marches with Nagl's view of the SF film as "surround[ing] people with
warnings, and although one or the other might be completely justified, the
ultimate effect of the genre leaves one discouraged in the acceptance of
unhappiness" (271). To feminist critics like Creed and Goodall this is certainly
true, since Alien 3 will appear the ultimate victory of mother-phobia woman's
Othering. In the light of the Company's threat, Ripley's death could be read as
the only possible resistance to both human and Alien monsters, a gesture that,
as a death from anorexia may be construed as the final denial of demands for
women's body-shaping, is a "No" to monstrous exploitation and a "Yes" to the
"future of humanity." I tend to think this is too optimistic a reading. Alien
signally fails to recover its ancestor's anti-capitalist message, or to come to
grips with new social elements such as religious revivalism. I sympathise with
Sigourney Weaver's urge to be rid of the character, but from a feminist or even a
psychoanalytic view, killing Ripley is only to repeat the message of
discouragement, the presentation of a world that women can live neither
within nor without, the same signal I received from Thelma and Louise.
Nevertheless, I could have acquiesced more readily in Ripley's death if it had
less passivity. Ripley could have gone out a hero. She rather than Dillon could
have held the Alien in the mould till the lead was poured. Her attempt to
hunt the Alien down could have been delayed and closed the film in heroic if
fatal combat, as battle did for Beowuif. Or the film could have exploited the
Alien's own half-sketched maternal instinct and let her force it to a choice of
killing her or dying to protect her. Having alienised the woman, why not
humanise the monster? That the film chose to alienise Ripley as both woman
and human, to give her a martyr's role of maternity and passivity, is a warning
as clear as any delivered by Susan Faludi: "Watch out, sisters. In the eighties
we were allowed to be human. Now we're being reduced back to baby-carriers.
Big Momma may be waiting out in space, but Big Daddy is right here on earth,
and he's coming to get you. Again."
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Works Cited
Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. "Woman: The Other Alien in Alien", Women Worldwalkers:
New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Jane B. Weedman,
Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech. Press, 1987, 9-24.
Chodorow, Nancy. "Family Structure and Feminine Personality" Feminism and
Psychoanalytic Theory, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, 4565.
Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection",
Screen, 27, 1986, 44-71.
Fitting, Peter. "The Second Alien", in "Symposium on Alien", ed. Charles Elkins,
Science Fiction Studies, Volume 7, 3, 1980, 285-293.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, London: Allen Lane, 1979.
Goodall, Jane R. "Aliens", Southern Review, 23, March, 1990, 73-82.
Nagl, Manfred. "The Science-Fiction Film in Historical Perspective", Science Fiction
Studies, 10, 1983, 262-277.
Neale, Stephen. "Genre and Cinema", Popular Television and Film ed. Tony Bennett e
al, London: BFI Publishing, 1981, 6-25.
Newton, Judith Lowder. "Feminism and Anxiety in Alien", in "Symposium on Alien", ed.
Charles Elkins, Science Fiction Studies, Volume 7, 3, 1980, 293-297.
Spencer, Katherine. "Victorian Urban Gothic: The First Modem Fantastic Literature",
Intersections, eds George Slusser and Eric Rabkin, Carbondale: U of Southern
Illinois Press, 1987, 87-96.
Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society, Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: U. of California
Press, 1975.
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