"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 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 's (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,

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 93 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 (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 quasi- feminist 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

94 LiNQ2O/I (1993) 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 god- danm 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 Company- betrayed 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

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 95 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, "no- one 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

96 LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 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 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

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 97 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's- knocked-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 , 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"?

98 LiNQ2O/1 (1993) 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."

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 99 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, 45- 65. 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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