"Comin' to Getcha - Again"

"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, 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 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 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.

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