Reproducing Ripley
Written by Gauntgirl, copyright 2001 & 2003
The horror and science fiction film genres are not often thought to be venues for feminist articulations of identity and desire. Conversely, they are genres usually aimed toward attracting a male audience through a glorification and hyper signification of masculine desires. In an unlikely genre, the Ridley Scott created character, Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1979), emerges as an unlikely champion of a feminist voice. Using theories of the monstrous feminine and the abject, it is my intention to explore the manner in which the Ripley character subverts dominant constructions of dualistic gender (an expected characteristic of the horror and sci-fi genres) throughout the Alien series. In the process I hope to recuperate the horror/sci-fi film as a fruitful venue for creating meaningful, alternate representations of women and as a tool towards inspiring subversive discourse.
The Alien series is ripe with images of birth/reproduction, the ‘primal scene’, and female anatomy. In her examination of the monstrous feminine and the abject mother in Ridley Scott’s Alien, Barbara Creed focuses her analysis on the architecture within the mise-en-scene and the alien creature. She identifies the first instance of a ‘mother’ in the film as the opening sequence of shots through the spaceship’s winding corridors, into a womb-like chamber where the crew are ‘born’. Womb/birth-like imagery is mirrored in the alien ship as well. Here, the crew enacts the primal scene by entering into the ship through the vaginal openings. They then venture into the ‘womb’ of the ship where Kane becomes impregnated by the alien egg. The scenes involving the alien ship and the alien creature are especially rich in reproductive images – more so than that of the purely human scenes. When the human crew is ‘born’ in the film’s opening scene, it is a clean, sterile act. This ‘normal’ birth is a product of the “Company” – the ambiguous, masculine power that gives “Mother” (the Nostromo) her orders. This sterile, masculine birth fantasy sharply contrasts the bloody, messy images of birth associated with the alien. When the alien reproduces, it is a violent affair – a rape. This act can be seen as representing masculine anxieties around the womb and vagina. This anxiety is linked to fear of castration (embodied by the vagina as ‘lack’) but it is also, more deeply, linked to the unclassifiable nature of the womb (unclassifiable in that it does not depend on a masculine counterpart for its definition – it is whole, or empty, unto itself). (Creed 1996)
So far, the film divides birth/reproduction between a clean, masculine act (fantasy) and a messy, feminine act (anxiety). The inseminating parasite is the first image to begin to cross this gendered border. The parasite defies definition. It comes from a womb/egg but is, itself, not a baby. On its underside, it has a vagina-like mouth opening but through this opening emerges a phallus, through which the ‘mother’ host is inseminated. In turn, this phallus also acts as an umbilicus; at the same time that it impregnates the host, it also keeps him alive by feeding him oxygen. The parasite crosses these borders between male and female characteristics of reproduction and, in so doing, it challenges the normal and embodies incest – a fatherless reproduction whereby the mother’s ‘phallus’ eliminates the need for the father.
Creed’s analysis of the monstrous feminine and abject mother in Alien, although thoughtfully considering the alien creature, fails to fully consider Ripley as an equally challenging force to the phallocentric norm. Indeed, in Alien, Ripley is still developing as a ‘phallic mother’. Creed defines Ripley’s role in Aliens as “[signifying] the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman.” (1996:62) Creed also reads Ripley as a more acceptable mother figure in her relation to the cat. In comparison to the alien as fetish object, it is reassuring that Ripley should choose a more ‘normal’ fetish object thereby reinstating a proper feminine image.
In the beginning of the director’s cut of Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) Ripley is reinforced as a mother figure. Once she is rescued by the Company we find out that she had spend 57 years floating through space in hyper-sleep. We also find out that she had had a daughter who has already died an old woman. This realization amplifies the horror of Ripley’s recurring nightmare – that of giving violent birth to the alien monster. For Ripley, the normal child she once had has been aborted and in her place is a terrifying foetus. Ripley’s decision to accompany the mission to find the aliens is ultimately an attempt to abort this unwanted pregnancy - this product of rape. Before she can do that, however, Ripley is forced to prove that she can function in the masculine realm, under the thumb of the Company.
The world of the Company is that of technological profit and militaristic dominance. For the Company, the alien is not so much a threat as a means toward further power. The Company’s interest in obtaining an alien specimen is specifically in dissecting its nature as both phallic and castrating. Ripley’s relationship to the Company is still one of invisibility. Her only importance to them is in her experience of the alien. In this manner, Ripley and the alien are in cooperation (as subversive forces against the patriarchy) and in direct competition (in the realm of motherhood). Spurned by the Company, Ripley becomes more like the alien (more monstrous/abject). In order to subvert the patriarchy, she must first emulate it – to attack from within, per se. She adopts flame-throwers and big guns as her phallus, and she quickly takes over command of the Company’s militaristic drones – the marines. Yet at the same time that Ripley is being constructed with hyper-masculine images, she is again reinforced as a mother. With the discovery of the orphaned girl, Newt (the only survivor of the alien attack on a terra-forming colony), Ripley immediately takes the role of nurturer. She desperately holds Newt close to her and Newt, in turn, quickly accepts Ripley as her surrogate mother. With Newt as Ripley’s fetish object, Ripley becomes even more powerful and more determined to destroy her competition and doppelganger– the mother alien.
The nature of the mother alien is not unlike that of a queen bee, constantly cloning troops to defend her hive. She is the ultimate matriarch. The battle between Ripley and the mother alien is a matter of defending the regime of motherhood – human vs. alien. In one of the most powerful scenes in Aliens, Ripley goes head to head with the mother alien. With Newt in one arm and a massive gun in the other, Ripley is the warrior mother, a phallic queen. The alien, on the other hand, detaches itself from its egg-laying womb. It abandons its procreative power to engage in the fight whereas Ripley holds her motherhood close and draws strength from it. In abandoning her offspring, her fetish objects, the alien mother suffers the ultimate consequence and is vanquished by Ripley for whom the love of a child is the greatest source of power.
In the third film of the series, Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992), Ripley, having spent an undefined amount of time floating in space once again, crash lands on a prison world. Newt has not survived the time in space and apparently died of fluid in her lungs while in hyper-sleep. Ripley is once again stripped of her ‘natural’ child. Even though Ripley’s motherhood is in jeopardy, the film continues to construct her as phallic. The prison world doesn’t contain any weapons to act as Ripley’s phallus so her masculinity is constructed by the negation of her feminine traits. The prison she now finds herself in is inhabited completely by men, many of who haven’t seen a woman in decades. To alleviate her overt threat to the men’s celibacy vows (to deny a sexualized gaze), Ripley’s hair is shaved and she is dressed in prison garb. Physically, there is little visible difference between her and the other men. At the same time as the film is constructing her with extremely masculine signs, it returns Ripley to the realm of motherhood more overtly than the previous two films. Ripley discovers through a CAT scan that she is pregnant. However, her child, this product of rape, is not a normal baby, it is another alien queen. The Company quickly finds out about the alien queen inside of Ripley by an automatic transmission of the CAT scan data, and they immediately send a team of doctors to dissect her. In the mean time, there is an alien loose in the prison, a stowaway from her crashed ship. As she did with the marines, Ripley takes over command of the prison and enlists the prisoners to help her kill the alien and, eventually, the queen within her. Even though Ripley lacks a child/fetish object to give her power in this film, she is nonetheless empowered by her pregnancy. Her pregnant state gives her the power to commit her final act of subversion against the patriarchal Company, and ultimately ensures a future for humanity. In the final scene of the film, Ripley plunges into the fires of a massive furnace, killing herself and the alien that simultaneously bursts from her chest. This act of abortion is nothing less that an attempt to save the reproductive function of humanity. Throughout the series so far, alien reproduction and human reproduction have been juxtaposed – alien reproduction as delivering death and human reproduction as giving life. The mother alien, in her reproductive function, is not only a threat to the continuation of humanity but also to Ripley’s position as dominant matriarch and normative mother figure – there can be only one Queen.
In the fourth film of the series Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997), the negotiations between the realms of life and death; feminine and masculine; mother and fetish object; find a heightened level of articulation in the reborn (cloned) Ripley. Two hundred years after Ripley’s death in Alien3, the Company (represented by a military research station – aptly named “Father”) uses a blood sample from the penal colony to clone Ripley; complete with the alien queen she was carrying. In the film’s opening scene, the recently ‘born’ Ripley clone finally gives ‘proper’ birth to the alien by cesarean section. As with the ‘birthing’ scenes from the first film, this cesarean birth is a reflection of the patriarchy’s endeavor to transform the messy processes of reproduction into a clean, sterile, normative act. Ripley, however, continues to challenge not only a ‘proper’ maternal function, she also transgresses the boundary between alien and human. Indeed, the Ripley clone embodies the heightened senses, awesome physical strength, cold calculation, and acidic blood of her alien child. The battle for motherhood (alien vs. human) is now centralized and internalized within Ripley’s fluid transgressions between the normal and monstrous aspects of her body and identity. In the film’s climax, Ripley is reunited with her stolen child. As Ripley has been transformed by the alien, the alien ‘child’ has also been transformed by Ripley’s humanity - this new alien queen is herself pregnant. The egg/wombs and inseminating parasites are no longer required for the alien to reproduce; she is now able to grow a baby within a womb of her own. This hybrid reproduction, however, remains fatherless. Rather, with the birth of her human/alien offspring, it is clear that she is the product of the queer, incestuous mingling of mother (Ripley) and child. The hybrid baby, however, identifies more with Ripley and destroys her alien mother in favor of humanity. Yet, for Ripley, the internal struggle between the monster, the human, and the mother has no end. Even though she realizes that her hybrid fetish object (the physical manifestation of her own hybridized identity) must be aborted for the good of humanity, she does so with the sadness of a mother who has been repeatedly torn from her children.
The Alien series of films offers a complex examination of issues important to woman coded within the standard techniques of horror/sci-fi filmmaking. By constructing the female heroine, Ripley, in the typically hyper-masculine manner, the filmmakers have created a venue within which to examine gender as fluid (changeable) while also making it approachable (and enjoyable) to the average sci-fi/horror/action/war movie fan (i.e. men). In the films, the juxtaposing of patriarchy (The Company) and matriarchy (Ripley and the aliens) not only acts to subvert normative gender constructs as products of phallologocentrism, it also acts to define humanity and the struggle toward survival. For Ripley, survival is in reproduction and human emotion, particularly the love of a child (motherhood). For the Company, survival is in appropriating the reproductive function of the alien for militaristic means. These acts of reproduction (as feminine function) ensure (or hinder in the case of the aliens) the continuance of the human species. Furthermore, reproduction, both human and alien, occurs without the interference of the male - it is a purely feminine affair. Therefore, in these films, reproduction is central to feminine articulations as existing outside the realm of masculine desire – outside of patriarchy altogether. These articulations are not only related to the desire of reproduction but also to issues of rape, abortion, or sexually transmitted disease. Reproduction is not necessarily represented as a joyous affair. Rather it describes power in feminine terms.
BibliographyCreed, Barbara, "Horror and the Monstrous Feminine," Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Grant, 35-65. Texas: U of T, 1996
Doherty, Thomas, "Genre, Gender, and the Aliens Trilogy," Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Grant, 181-199. Texas: U of T, 1996
Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Colorado: Westview Press, 2000
Thornham, Sue. Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997
