“Alien” and the Threat to the Nuclear Family
by The Friday & Saturday Night Critic
Warning: MANY SPOILERS!
Click here to read the F&SN Critic’s review of “Alien” (2003 Director’s Cut).
“Alien” contains multiple wombs, including the cryogenic tubes where we first find the sleeping crew, the snug white room where the all-powerful computer lives, and the unlucky sod who “births” the first monster. With no backstories and no talk of home or family, it’s safe to say that the “Nostromo” gives birth to the crew; the haunted house creates its own explorers. What does all this mean? Like all good horror films, we’re never quite sure if any of “Alien’s” subtexts connect into a proper treatise, but recurrent, subconscious themes dig into us anyway, making the movie’s scares deeper, more subconscious, and, therefore, more effective. With its man giving birth, its remote father figure being called Mother, and an all-female race out to “understand” us to death, it’s pretty clear that fears about sex and gender roles are definitely being tapped in “Alien.” When seen with an eye on the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s, this 1979 film can embody fears about changing gender roles, or it can just as easily embody more timeless fears about a nuclear family driven “out of whack” by a capitalist machine that has lost all mercy and shame.
(When discussing the themes of a horror film, that genre whose appeal is the most unconscious and the least reasonable, it is important to mention early on that the filmmakers may have had no intention of including anything remotely like the theories I’m about to present. This does not at all refute any of them, because meanings aimed at the unconscious may just as likely originate in someone else’s unconscious. Ridley Scott and his writers could have included millions of unconscious fears and concerns without even knowing it.)
“Alien” features one of the finest casts ever assembled for a horror film, but for the purpose of this discussion, my focus will mostly be Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), who is more of an exasperated shift manager than a leader; second officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who is serious, even ruthless, and whose authority is continually undercut; science officer Ash (Ian Holm), who is an obvious beta male, yet constantly reminding the crew, through sighs and clipped, precise speech, what a burden his intelligence is around minds like theirs; and Lambert the navigator (Veronica Cartwright), who doesn’t take stress very well. And, of course, we shan’t forget their computer, named Mother, and the monster itself.
The full-grown beast has a head that it is nothing if not phallic, yet newly-restored scenes, tidbits from its sequels, and other sources, both official and unofficial, suggest that the species is entirely female. Each member is capable of limited egg-laying. Asexual reproduction is not popular among more complex forms of life, so in order to find new genetic code to allow for mutation and adaptation, alien pupae are incubated within living hosts, and even take on some of the host’s characteristics (more on that later). A man, Kane (played by John Hurt), is picked for this role in “Alien,” and he provides his share of the offspring’s DNA, just like men do in traditional human reproduction. Yet the man has been forced to suffer the two most emasculating procedures: the man, not the woman, has been “raped,” and the man is “giving birth.”
This is certainly a cunning way for the film to make men frightened in a way that is traditionally limited only to the softer sex. The alien has also rendered the human females useless to the reproductive process, while desiring to keep the men for itself, alive, for reproductive (sexual?) reasons. Near the end of the Director’s Cut, we witness a gruesome scene in which the beast has kept two male crewmembers in a state of living death, to use them as incubators (is a woman with a penis, the symbol of predatory sexuality, entitled to this all-male harem?). As Dr. Strangelove pointed out, for a race to survive, it is better to have more women than men so that reproduction can be as efficient as possible. Yet “Alien” features three women and four men (I do not count the machines Ash and Mother). It appears that the women, not the men, are battling one another for territorial rights over the men. Gender roles have been swapped: the female alien wants the men for itself, Ripley wants the men to obey her and be shut in the airlock, Lambert wants the men safely inside, and all three butt heads. (With Solomonic justice, the screenplay decrees that neither species keeps the prized males.) This is why the alien kills the men quickly, or not at all, but why Lambert’s fate, discussed later, is the most disturbing and humiliating.
Not all of the alien’s threat can be considered gender-swapping. Some of its dread comes from good old-fashioned male fear of women. When the alien is discovered, one of its species has already been birthed from a different alien race, the one that created and piloted the marooned spaceship found by the crew of the “Nostromo.” This second race, to which I shall refer as the sentient aliens, bears a vague resemblance to the beast which stalks the crew. Yet the evil alien also has the fingernails and posture of a human being, and not of the sentient aliens. From this we can assume that the beasts acquire genetic material, and therefore characteristics, from their host incubators. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, in the four “Alien” pictures, we have never once seen the beasts in their natural form, but only after they have adapted themselves through who-knows-how-many different host species. The beasts have “understood” their hosts until the hosts die from it. They “suck face” (kiss, become intimate) with their hosts, deprive them of their individuality, and leave them dead. The expression “face-hugger” is used as a more subtle description. This bears an interesting, if tenuous, connection to the old male fear that when a woman keeps asking him questions, wanting to know what he feels, what makes him tick, that when he finally confesses all, she will have taken his soul, and he will be wiped out.
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