It’s a sexist, limited way of thinking about gender roles in media, and one that does a disservice by Cameron’s own oeuvre; Rose DeWitt Bukatter is one of his strongest characters after all -and then of course there’s that heroine he inherited from Ridley Scott.
Alien is a movie extremely rich in evocative imagery and symbolism, from which numerous interpretations are gleaned. There’s a nature vs. artificiality aspect, in which each come off as dangerous, the films’ two antagonists being representatives of both designations. There’s a cautionary tale on unchecked capitalism, a crew of blue collar employees whose lives mean literally nothing to a nameless corporation driven by profit (the Weyland-Yutani name wouldn’t be added until the sequels where the company loses a good chunk of its intimidating mystique).
Only in the chestburster phase and subsequent adult form does the alien take on definitively masculine physical signifiers -the phallic head for example, and the darting secondary mouth. It retains a slight feminine figure, but the male features stand out more strongly. All of these designs were borne out of the nightmares of H.R. Giger, whose surrealist art has always been disturbingly sexual -but this shifting in the sexual imagery is fascinating. Why does the alien start feminine and then become masculine? Perhaps it has to do with the films’ plotting and message.
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon never attempted to hide the fact that Alien was about rape, specifically male rape. O’Bannon wanted to imbue a fear of rape in men in a genre that frequently violates women, saying that “the oral invasion of Hurt's character was 'payback' for all those horror films in which sexually vulnerable women were terrorised by rampaging male monsters.”[3] Not only is Kane (John Hurt) “raped” by this creature, but he is forced to essentially carry its progeny to term, give birth, and die as a result -a horrifying fiction for men, a more horrifying reality for many women. In his book, Beautiful Monsters, David McIntee suggests that male fears and misunderstandings of childbirth inform such horror elements and implications[4], and that may well be the key.
It’s against all this metaphor, extreme imagery, and sexually-informed body horror, that we have Ripley, who, her gender aside, is easily the most sensible and savvy person on board. Everybody else is making the wrong decisions while showing little regard for her authority and adherence to protocol, yet she continually formulates the best plans and demonstrates a hardiness and resourcefulness far exceeding her co-workers when the going gets tough. O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett claimed to have written the crew without gender (hence the unisex nature of the character names), however I don’t know if I entirely believe that; at the very least Ripley must have been female by the final scripting phase.
Yet as the situation escalates, she rises to the occasion, refusing to temper her authority, and demonstrating a strong ability to retain her smarts and competence under the intense pressure in the aftermath of Dallas’ death. As Mackay notes, “Her assertiveness is not just a novel character trait, but the engine of the narrative and the key to her survival.”[5] This level-headedness continues to save her when she’s the last one left –the horror movies’ “final girl”, albeit not a virginal, innocent waif, but a powerful, intelligent, and resourceful woman. In a way the film is all about how the short-sighted, idiotic actions of masculinity forced this woman through hell –for her to emerge triumphant. As Thomas Hobbes put it, “strip away the gothic, space-bound horror and Alien is about a rational woman fighting to be heard in an irrational, male-dominated world.” [6]
And as far as this impression goes there’s no greater obstacle and manifestation of toxic masculine misogyny than Ash, quiet though it often is. Ash and Ripley’s relationship is one of subdued hostility, from their first meaningful interaction over the com when Ash, supervising the landing party, dissuades her from checking in on them after she discovers the signal they were responding to was one of warning rather than distress. It lays seeds of distrust pretty early on, even before he lets the infected Kane back onboard. There are some interesting things to be gleaned from her confrontation with him about this, more than him playing the morality card when she reminds him of his scientific duty. Ash’s body language is tense, there’s a reserved frustration that he doesn’t express openly with the notion of Ripley’s authority –hints of a misogynist underpinning to the way he side-eyes her and responds to her shortly. And then it gets sexual.
As mentioned before, for all intents and purposes, the adult alien is male-coded (the phallic head particularly prominent when she gases it out of its hiding spot), and we’re now forced to see Ripley as it sees her -in a manner not unlike how Ash sees her: a sexual creature and a threatening one. The last stand between Ripley and alien becomes one of gender; the quick-witted, considered feminine vs. the predatory masculine …and the feminine wins.
And in relation to them Ripley is once more presented as the better commander next to the incompetent Gorman (William Hope), who like Dallas, has a tendency to dismiss her and show insecurity over her overruling him. Her attitude and resilience is still in place, from her abrasiveness at the company inquiry to her shutting down Hudson’s panicked caviling, but with it comes masculine undertones. She more or less fits in with the marines, forming stronger relationships than she had with her co-workers on the Nostromo –and she does this by demonstrating masculinity: showing an ability to pilot a mechanical walker, showing an interest in using guns, and ultimately defeating her nemesis through a physical brawl. And she barely exchanges words with any of the women on the mission. As Jeffords notes, “Ripley’s “feminism”, like the popular images of feminism promoted by contemporary American cultural ideology, is vicious only because it accepts the point of view of a corporate masculism at the expense of relations between women.”[8] Her emotionality is also kept in check, only ever surfacing when experiencing trauma, and then succinctly suppressed by one of the men, usually Hicks (Michael Biehn) –equating such terrified, intense, even survivalist outbursts with weakness.
Cameron doesn’t entirely de-feminize Ripley though, however his feminine coding certainly leaves something to be desired; such as the fact that a few times in the movie her otherwise rigorous capabilities fail her, and she has to be saved by a man, giving male audiences the assurance that she still needs them. Her budding romance with Hicks is also a way of reinforcing her femininity, accurately described by Mackay as “some of the most badly timed cinematic flirting ever.”[9] She also undergoes a similar betrayal to what happened with her and Ash, in the evolution of her relationship with company stooge Burke (Paul Reiser); initially Ripley’s only defender, but foreshadowed and ultimately proven to be as sinister as Ash –the “nice guy” turned toxic.
Ripley and the Queen represent opposite notions of motherhood, the former the caring and determined protector of her young, while the latter is an extension of that male ignorance and horror of the matriarch and feminine reproduction. Clover wrote “to the extent that the monster is constructed as feminine, the horror film thus expresses female desire only to show how monstrous it is. The intention is manifest in Aliens, in which the Final Girl, Ripley, is pitted in the climactic scene against the most terrifying “alien” of all: an egg-laying Mother.”[10] The last act pits these two powerful mother figures against each other in a brute way, with Ripley drawing first blood by incinerating the queens’ remaining eggs. This battle of dominance culminates in Ripley’s birth as an action hero in her fight with the queen in the climax, the “get away from her, you bitch” line emphasizing the queens’ femaleness while masking Ripley’s own. Ripley wins Jeffords’ “battle of the big mommas” and is rewarded with Newt validating her as “mommy”.
Her femininity isolates her, and so she is made androgynous: she is given prison clothes and her head is shaved. Her sole feminine attribute is a casual sexual relationship she begins with prison doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), which itself is neutralized when Clemens is killed by the new alien. Her genderlessness likewise gives her more authority with the other inmates when the carnage starts. But try as it might, the film can’t get away from the maternal imagery and subtext that has been a part of this series since day one, substituting surrogate child Newt for a form of “real” offspring in Ripley unknowingly being a host to a new queen. Naturally she wants to get rid of it, enlisting Dillon to kill her before it is “born”, and it isn’t hard to see the abortion metaphor in her non-consentingly carrying this creature.
Before closing though, allow me to return to the original Alien once more to address one character I consciously overlooked earlier who perhaps is the key to how much one can say Alien is a feminist film. Veronica Cartwright’s Lambert is the other woman of the Nostromo and the most sympathetic character after Ripley. But not being in the same position as Ripley (both in-universe as a lower ranking navigator and metatextually as a supporting character) affords her different treatment. She’s kept out of the analysis of the planet surface before Dallas volunteers her for the scouting mission without her consent. On that mission, her legitimate concerns and worries are dismissed by Kane as “griping”, as are her insistences of going back.
Lambert is a panicky nervous wreck while Ripley can keep it together: when Lambert wants to abandon ship in the aftermath of Dallas’ death, going so far as to propose drawing straws for the unaccommodating shuttle, Ripley continues the plan to hunt the alien, acquiescing only after Ash is destroyed. There’s a notable passive aggressiveness between the two characters from early on (consider Lamberts’ shortness with Ripley when assessing where they are). And it’s a failure of the film not to include many scenes of the women interacting. There are a couple deleted scenes between them, one where Lambert violently confronts Ripley for nearly leaving them, and another more significant one, where Ripley reassures Lambert of her plan.
But then there’s the issue of Lambert’s death, where the films’ sexual violation metaphor becomes a full-on implication. Rather than see the alien simply attack her with its second mouth as we had with Brett and Parker, we get a shot of its tail slinking its way up the back of her leg before a cut to a scream, and when Ripley finds the bodies of her and Parker, Lambert’s leg is hanging from above the frame …and it’s bare. This wasn’t always going to be the way it ended for her. The script at various stages had her cocooned, beheaded, torched, or gruesomely sucked through an airlock (as would happen to the hybrid monstrosity of Alien Resurrection)[13]. Cartwright recalled that originally she was supposed to die of fright while hiding from the alien in a locker, and noted that the leg we see in the final film is actually Stanton’s –an unused shot filmed for Brett’s death.
The fact that the filmmakers chose to use the shot most suggestive of sexual assault for Lambert’s death instead speaks to the disturbing proclivity 70s genre films had towards depicting (or alluding to) female rape. While the idea that the alien attacks female victims differently than males opens another conversation, it’s difficult to see any positive feminism in a fate so misogynistic, especially when the way the alien is framed over Lambert also comes across as evocative of a male predator. As much as O’Bannon wanted to instill a fear of rape in men, it undercuts his intent a fraction to only literalize it towards a woman. I think the scene does hurt the films’ overall feminist message, without nullifying it; a reminder that as ahead of its time as the movie was in other regards, it was still a product of a film culture that thought little of the brutalization of women, what Molly Haskell referred to as “the age of ambivalence” (and this is all without even addressing Lambert’s posthumous outing as a trans woman in Aliens[14], adding swaths of further layers of interpretation).
In spite of this, the feminism of Alien still stands strong. Mackay writes “Alien is not, as a whole, a feminist work. Yet Ripley’s force as a character blasts through the sexual subtexts, and far outlasts them; you don’t remember her as threatened, but as triumphing …Ripley is brave but not fearless, strong but not heartless. She doesn't talk macho tough, but she takes up space: hands on hips, feet on chairs.”[15] This is the kind of feminism I really admire in film, the kind that doesn’t have to de-feminize to render a character powerful. And the impression left by Ripley was a deep one, even before Cameron added a dose of testosterone to her identity. And that’s not to say that Cameron and Aliens are bad (on the contrary, I really like Aliens), but on further inspection it’s Alien that yields more meaningful characters, themes, commentary, and subtext from a feminist point of view; and those things are what make Ripley’s journey worth following and studying in the subsequent movies. It’s a key part of this extraordinary franchise, and why that inaugural film is still compelling and impactful forty years on.
In space, no one can hear you scream, because Ripley isn’t the kind of woman to do that.
Oh yes, on the surface Sigourney Weaver’s resilient and resourceful Ripley seems to fall into line with Cameron’s earlier cited definition of great female characters, but looking at her closer and against the backdrop of feminist expression across the Alien movies reveals something more nuanced; that Ripley is a character who began feminine, became masculine, then androgynous before ending her life in female self-sacrifice, and that her characterization as such was informed by the masculine, feminine, sexual, and biological aesthetics of each film of the Alien trilogy. And yes, I’m consciously omitting Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection, not just because it’s so bad, but because Ripley’s character arc comes to a decisive end with Alien 3 -the Ripley of the fourth film being a clone, and appropriately a shell of the former character.
Before going further I recognize that I, as a cis-het male, am not the ideal person to be discussing feminist film theory, and that my analysis and conclusions pertaining to this film can only mean so much as a result of that. Simply, I was fascinated and interested in looking at Alien through this lens, and figured I had a particular take I wanted to explore. But I acknowledge that this won’t be anywhere near as useful or authentic as any similar piece of criticism written by a woman could be. I therefore recommend reading Emily Mackay’s great article “The Talented Ms. Ripley: 40 Years of Alien’s Complex Feminist Legacy” (which essentially beat me to a lot of the points I’ll discuss), Susan Jeffords’ “The Battle of the Big Mamas: Feminism and the Alienation of Women”, Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and if you can somehow access them, the numerous articles and essays on this IP written by women buried in academic magazines and research sites.
Before going further I recognize that I, as a cis-het male, am not the ideal person to be discussing feminist film theory, and that my analysis and conclusions pertaining to this film can only mean so much as a result of that. Simply, I was fascinated and interested in looking at Alien through this lens, and figured I had a particular take I wanted to explore. But I acknowledge that this won’t be anywhere near as useful or authentic as any similar piece of criticism written by a woman could be. I therefore recommend reading Emily Mackay’s great article “The Talented Ms. Ripley: 40 Years of Alien’s Complex Feminist Legacy” (which essentially beat me to a lot of the points I’ll discuss), Susan Jeffords’ “The Battle of the Big Mamas: Feminism and the Alienation of Women”, Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and if you can somehow access them, the numerous articles and essays on this IP written by women buried in academic magazines and research sites.
Alien is a movie extremely rich in evocative imagery and symbolism, from which numerous interpretations are gleaned. There’s a nature vs. artificiality aspect, in which each come off as dangerous, the films’ two antagonists being representatives of both designations. There’s a cautionary tale on unchecked capitalism, a crew of blue collar employees whose lives mean literally nothing to a nameless corporation driven by profit (the Weyland-Yutani name wouldn’t be added until the sequels where the company loses a good chunk of its intimidating mystique). 
But the most overt themes are inherently sexual. There’s a particularly Freudian bent in how the sexual imagery itself is seen to be horrifying and lethal, disturbing and intense; as well as how asexual the Nostromo is -the characters literally awaken in a form of innocent purity in an environment that resembles a hospital incubator (also the ships’ computer is literally called “Mother”) -only for sexuality to enter the film once they reach the planet. And the sexuality they encounter there is explicitly feminine. The crashed ship may be horseshoe-shaped, but they enter through a vaginal opening in the middle. And then of course there’s the eggs, always coded feminine, and the ultrasound-like movement within. Finally there’s the facehugger itself, with a vagina-like core out of which the otherwise male inseminating tube protrudes.
Only in the chestburster phase and subsequent adult form does the alien take on definitively masculine physical signifiers -the phallic head for example, and the darting secondary mouth. It retains a slight feminine figure, but the male features stand out more strongly. All of these designs were borne out of the nightmares of H.R. Giger, whose surrealist art has always been disturbingly sexual -but this shifting in the sexual imagery is fascinating. Why does the alien start feminine and then become masculine? Perhaps it has to do with the films’ plotting and message.
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon never attempted to hide the fact that Alien was about rape, specifically male rape. O’Bannon wanted to imbue a fear of rape in men in a genre that frequently violates women, saying that “the oral invasion of Hurt's character was 'payback' for all those horror films in which sexually vulnerable women were terrorised by rampaging male monsters.”[3] Not only is Kane (John Hurt) “raped” by this creature, but he is forced to essentially carry its progeny to term, give birth, and die as a result -a horrifying fiction for men, a more horrifying reality for many women. In his book, Beautiful Monsters, David McIntee suggests that male fears and misunderstandings of childbirth inform such horror elements and implications[4], and that may well be the key. 
The male characters are fascinated by the alien eggs and the facehugger, but once in its adult form they only fear it. Femininity makes the eggs approachable, masculinity keeps the alien terrifying, and the facehugger is in that middle ground of confusion and wariness, but also curiosity. The movie plays off male apprehensions and misconceptions about femininity, only for it to lead to a distinctly male threat right when the phallic juvenile escapes from a mans’ body. The chestbursting itself is a perverse idea of childbirth, perhaps what the process might sound like to a kid first learning about it in sex ed.
It’s against all this metaphor, extreme imagery, and sexually-informed body horror, that we have Ripley, who, her gender aside, is easily the most sensible and savvy person on board. Everybody else is making the wrong decisions while showing little regard for her authority and adherence to protocol, yet she continually formulates the best plans and demonstrates a hardiness and resourcefulness far exceeding her co-workers when the going gets tough. O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett claimed to have written the crew without gender (hence the unisex nature of the character names), however I don’t know if I entirely believe that; at the very least Ripley must have been female by the final scripting phase. 
Her character is the walking embodiment of the confident woman in charge, subtly disrespected by her colleagues and underlings. Consider the scene where she’s talking to Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) about their shares, how their candour and language suggests they see her as an equal rather than a superior and how she attempts to assert the rightful power dynamic as they joke with her -it’s indicative of many an interaction a female boss (particularly in a typically masculine occupation like trucking –which is the nearest analogue to what these characters do) has had with male employees. Or note how she’s frequently disregarded and undermined by the men: Ash (Ian Holm) letting the landing party and their contaminant in against her direct order, Captain Dallas (Tom Skeritt) ignoring Ripley’s concerns about the ships’ condition and her objections to his blindly giving Ash free reign with the parasite.
Yet as the situation escalates, she rises to the occasion, refusing to temper her authority, and demonstrating a strong ability to retain her smarts and competence under the intense pressure in the aftermath of Dallas’ death. As Mackay notes, “Her assertiveness is not just a novel character trait, but the engine of the narrative and the key to her survival.”[5] This level-headedness continues to save her when she’s the last one left –the horror movies’ “final girl”, albeit not a virginal, innocent waif, but a powerful, intelligent, and resourceful woman. In a way the film is all about how the short-sighted, idiotic actions of masculinity forced this woman through hell –for her to emerge triumphant. As Thomas Hobbes put it, “strip away the gothic, space-bound horror and Alien is about a rational woman fighting to be heard in an irrational, male-dominated world.” [6]
And as far as this impression goes there’s no greater obstacle and manifestation of toxic masculine misogyny than Ash, quiet though it often is. Ash and Ripley’s relationship is one of subdued hostility, from their first meaningful interaction over the com when Ash, supervising the landing party, dissuades her from checking in on them after she discovers the signal they were responding to was one of warning rather than distress. It lays seeds of distrust pretty early on, even before he lets the infected Kane back onboard. There are some interesting things to be gleaned from her confrontation with him about this, more than him playing the morality card when she reminds him of his scientific duty. Ash’s body language is tense, there’s a reserved frustration that he doesn’t express openly with the notion of Ripley’s authority –hints of a misogynist underpinning to the way he side-eyes her and responds to her shortly. And then it gets sexual. 
Ash’s eventual attack of Ripley is full of aggressive sexual imagery: his exposed chest a parody of rugged masculinity, the semen-like android blood that appears after Ripley throttles him, his murder attempt of suffocating her with a rolled up porn magazine –both a reference to the alien insemination and a clear assertion of sexual dominance. Even after he’s been revealed and disassembled, his comment on admiring the aliens’ “purity” reads as a dig against Ripley, especially now we know just how many men think about women in these terms. It’s likewise not hard to identify Ripley’s earlier denigration of Ash and his non-efforts as directly predicating the assault. She emphatically affirmed a degree of power over him (having access to Mother), so he had to have his back. What can’t be ignored about all this too is Ash’s role as the personification of the Corporation the crew works for, and thus how his toxic masculinity is equated with a system that already sees these people as expendable.
If any of this were in the original script, it’s impossible it was written with a genderless cast. Because gender power dynamics are all over this relationship, and elsewhere in the movie Ripley is incredibly female. As much as she’s been redefined as an action-hero badass (particularly by Aliens), there’s no brute strength to her in this movie, rather she’s defined by her assertiveness, adaptability, and guile. Though she has a steady head, she’s not closed off to the horror of the situation, visibly showing more stress and emotional ware as the body count rises. Her empathy is important too, risking herself to save the crew cat Jones despite being in survivalist mode -there’s a nurturing impulse in this that of course would form a big part of her character in Aliens, in which she would likewise go back to save a helpless one.
In this, her feminine strength is reinforced by her care, her tenacity and self-preservation instinct, visually illustrated by her tying her hair back when setting the self-destruct and undressing when in safety on the pod. Christine Schoefer notes “We have Ripley wandering around clad only in her underwear. A little reminder of her gender, lest we lose sight of it?”[7] She’s conspicuously feminine now. Story-wise, this leaves her vulnerable for the impending reveal, but it’s also voyeuristic -the camera giving us if not the literal, the identifiable point-of-view of the alien.
As mentioned before, for all intents and purposes, the adult alien is male-coded (the phallic head particularly prominent when she gases it out of its hiding spot), and we’re now forced to see Ripley as it sees her -in a manner not unlike how Ash sees her: a sexual creature and a threatening one. The last stand between Ripley and alien becomes one of gender; the quick-witted, considered feminine vs. the predatory masculine …and the feminine wins.
This isn’t so much reversed as it is made greyer in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, where Ripley is both the same and a different character. While aspects of her personality are consistent, and in some cases evolve, she’s redefined as a more grizzled figurehead and ultimately as an action hero. Here she embodies the brooding, damaged type, and her forceful leadership is made to stand out in an environment of male chauvinism and toxic masculinity far less subtextual than in Alien.
The marines are much more openly sexual characters from the first shot of them emerging from stasis. They wear less clothing –shoulders and upper arms are usually bare- and they carry their comically large guns some at waist level to hammer home their phallic symbolism. Even the women of the crew, most notably Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) carry themselves with a masculine toughness and boys club mentality (even to the point of tolerating racist remarks), to the degree their femininity is no longer apparent. “You ever been mistaken for a man?” Hudson (Bill Paxton) crudely jokes to Vasquez. Her romantic relationship with fellow marine Drake (Mark Rolston) has not an ounce of the sentimental to it, but a fierce, almost homoerotic comradery. The whole marine crew is a flood of distinctly 80s machismo in contrast to the earlier films’ relatively timeless characters.
And in relation to them Ripley is once more presented as the better commander next to the incompetent Gorman (William Hope), who like Dallas, has a tendency to dismiss her and show insecurity over her overruling him. Her attitude and resilience is still in place, from her abrasiveness at the company inquiry to her shutting down Hudson’s panicked caviling, but with it comes masculine undertones. She more or less fits in with the marines, forming stronger relationships than she had with her co-workers on the Nostromo –and she does this by demonstrating masculinity: showing an ability to pilot a mechanical walker, showing an interest in using guns, and ultimately defeating her nemesis through a physical brawl. And she barely exchanges words with any of the women on the mission. As Jeffords notes, “Ripley’s “feminism”, like the popular images of feminism promoted by contemporary American cultural ideology, is vicious only because it accepts the point of view of a corporate masculism at the expense of relations between women.”[8] Her emotionality is also kept in check, only ever surfacing when experiencing trauma, and then succinctly suppressed by one of the men, usually Hicks (Michael Biehn) –equating such terrified, intense, even survivalist outbursts with weakness.
Cameron doesn’t entirely de-feminize Ripley though, however his feminine coding certainly leaves something to be desired; such as the fact that a few times in the movie her otherwise rigorous capabilities fail her, and she has to be saved by a man, giving male audiences the assurance that she still needs them. Her budding romance with Hicks is also a way of reinforcing her femininity, accurately described by Mackay as “some of the most badly timed cinematic flirting ever.”[9] She also undergoes a similar betrayal to what happened with her and Ash, in the evolution of her relationship with company stooge Burke (Paul Reiser); initially Ripley’s only defender, but foreshadowed and ultimately proven to be as sinister as Ash –the “nice guy” turned toxic. 
But the big thing is her relationship with Newt (Carrie Henn), and the films’ powerful theme on motherhood. Her immediate affection for and nurturing nature towards Newt is the defining aspect of her character in Aliens, and the film compliments this with the addition of an alien queen to act as her primary (and primal) foe. Ripley’s motherly tenderness and communication with Newt prevents her from being wholly masculine, clumsily literalized in a deleted scene establishing a daughter she lost, and the manner in which it is dressed in masculine actions and language is the movies’ most fascinating dichotomy.
Ripley and the Queen represent opposite notions of motherhood, the former the caring and determined protector of her young, while the latter is an extension of that male ignorance and horror of the matriarch and feminine reproduction. Clover wrote “to the extent that the monster is constructed as feminine, the horror film thus expresses female desire only to show how monstrous it is. The intention is manifest in Aliens, in which the Final Girl, Ripley, is pitted in the climactic scene against the most terrifying “alien” of all: an egg-laying Mother.”[10] The last act pits these two powerful mother figures against each other in a brute way, with Ripley drawing first blood by incinerating the queens’ remaining eggs. This battle of dominance culminates in Ripley’s birth as an action hero in her fight with the queen in the climax, the “get away from her, you bitch” line emphasizing the queens’ femaleness while masking Ripley’s own. Ripley wins Jeffords’ “battle of the big mommas” and is rewarded with Newt validating her as “mommy”. 
This maternal side of her character is swiftly jettisoned in the opening moments of the David Fincher-directed Alien 3, where Newt and Hicks are killed off by a facehugger while in cryo-sleep. The choice by the filmmakers here represents a dismissal of Cameron’s development of Ripley in favour of their own. Of course Ripley in Alien 3 is notably underdeveloped, the focus being more on how she’s perceived by the prison colony she has crashed into. While a few of her masculine tendencies carry over, she’s less an action hero, and her femininity is made a major point amongst the all-male environment. She is objectified, victimized, scapegoated, and shunned for it –gender has never been overtly a more important aspect of the Alien franchise. Though she has a protector of sorts in Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), his religious convictions allow him to only see her as “temptation”.
Her femininity isolates her, and so she is made androgynous: she is given prison clothes and her head is shaved. Her sole feminine attribute is a casual sexual relationship she begins with prison doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), which itself is neutralized when Clemens is killed by the new alien. Her genderlessness likewise gives her more authority with the other inmates when the carnage starts. But try as it might, the film can’t get away from the maternal imagery and subtext that has been a part of this series since day one, substituting surrogate child Newt for a form of “real” offspring in Ripley unknowingly being a host to a new queen. Naturally she wants to get rid of it, enlisting Dillon to kill her before it is “born”, and it isn’t hard to see the abortion metaphor in her non-consentingly carrying this creature. 
Ultimately though it is she who kills herself, choosing to end the alien lineage with the infant queen bursting through her chest as she plummets into fire, rather than give it up to a human Bishop (Lance Henriksen) for the promise of a life and family. It’s a powerful, self-deterministic close to Ripley’s arc, ending the series in birth imagery as she had begun it –her femininity restored.
Before closing though, allow me to return to the original Alien once more to address one character I consciously overlooked earlier who perhaps is the key to how much one can say Alien is a feminist film. Veronica Cartwright’s Lambert is the other woman of the Nostromo and the most sympathetic character after Ripley. But not being in the same position as Ripley (both in-universe as a lower ranking navigator and metatextually as a supporting character) affords her different treatment. She’s kept out of the analysis of the planet surface before Dallas volunteers her for the scouting mission without her consent. On that mission, her legitimate concerns and worries are dismissed by Kane as “griping”, as are her insistences of going back. 
All through the film we see her struggle to compose herself among her male colleagues, whom she often seems isolated from. As such, she is the most susceptible to fear. According to Scott, she’s meant to be an audience avatar, to epitomize their terror in this, and even Cartwright seems to share this interpretation: “She was the one who first expressed the fears that most people might have.”[11] She goes on to say she’d rationalized it through conceiving a backstory “…that this was her last trip and she was on her way home; and I worked to the effect that she had an experience before that wasn’t too pleasant.”[12] And this shows through in the character (Cartwright is a very underrated actress and won a Saturn Award for this performance), which I think makes Lambert more than an archetypal hysterical woman –though that coding is undeniably still there, especially in contrast to Ripley.
Lambert is a panicky nervous wreck while Ripley can keep it together: when Lambert wants to abandon ship in the aftermath of Dallas’ death, going so far as to propose drawing straws for the unaccommodating shuttle, Ripley continues the plan to hunt the alien, acquiescing only after Ash is destroyed. There’s a notable passive aggressiveness between the two characters from early on (consider Lamberts’ shortness with Ripley when assessing where they are). And it’s a failure of the film not to include many scenes of the women interacting. There are a couple deleted scenes between them, one where Lambert violently confronts Ripley for nearly leaving them, and another more significant one, where Ripley reassures Lambert of her plan. 
This latter scene allows Lambert to express some real feelings (“it just seems like you’re asking us to kill each other one by one”), to which Ripley promises to get them out. Except for a subsequent bit to the conversation regarding the sexuality of Ash, this scene allows for a great moment of understanding between the two women and emphasizes Ripley’s capacity to be comforting and tender, and it really ought to have been left in.
But then there’s the issue of Lambert’s death, where the films’ sexual violation metaphor becomes a full-on implication. Rather than see the alien simply attack her with its second mouth as we had with Brett and Parker, we get a shot of its tail slinking its way up the back of her leg before a cut to a scream, and when Ripley finds the bodies of her and Parker, Lambert’s leg is hanging from above the frame …and it’s bare. This wasn’t always going to be the way it ended for her. The script at various stages had her cocooned, beheaded, torched, or gruesomely sucked through an airlock (as would happen to the hybrid monstrosity of Alien Resurrection)[13]. Cartwright recalled that originally she was supposed to die of fright while hiding from the alien in a locker, and noted that the leg we see in the final film is actually Stanton’s –an unused shot filmed for Brett’s death. 
The fact that the filmmakers chose to use the shot most suggestive of sexual assault for Lambert’s death instead speaks to the disturbing proclivity 70s genre films had towards depicting (or alluding to) female rape. While the idea that the alien attacks female victims differently than males opens another conversation, it’s difficult to see any positive feminism in a fate so misogynistic, especially when the way the alien is framed over Lambert also comes across as evocative of a male predator. As much as O’Bannon wanted to instill a fear of rape in men, it undercuts his intent a fraction to only literalize it towards a woman. I think the scene does hurt the films’ overall feminist message, without nullifying it; a reminder that as ahead of its time as the movie was in other regards, it was still a product of a film culture that thought little of the brutalization of women, what Molly Haskell referred to as “the age of ambivalence” (and this is all without even addressing Lambert’s posthumous outing as a trans woman in Aliens[14], adding swaths of further layers of interpretation). 
In space, no one can hear you scream, because Ripley isn’t the kind of woman to do that.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
[4] McIntee, David, Beautiful Monsters, 2005
[7] Schoefer, Christine, East Bay Express, 5
September 1986, p.37
[8] Jeffords, Susan, “The Battle of the Big Mommas:
Feminism and the Alienation of Women”, The Journal of American Culture, Fall
1987, vol.10, issue 3, p. 73
[10] Clover,
Carol J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
p. 47-48
[11] Veronica
Cartwright, Fantastic Films, October 1979
[12] Veronica
Cartwright, Fantastic Films, October 1979
[13] Ridley
Scott, Fantastic Films, October 1979
Comments
Post a Comment