But even this can be construed as a kind of gender swapping. The male fear of women is here embodied, metaphorically, by pregnancy, yet one of the oldest female fears is pregnancy itself, which is not at all metaphorical. “Alien” is nothing if not a heightened version of every woman’s dread of a gory, bloody, painful pregnancy leading to the birth of an ingrate. The woman’s fear of the man has become the man’s fear of the woman.
Is Ripley an abused daughter running away from an abusive home?
Speaking of women, the two human women in “Alien” are Ripley (Weaver), who survives, and Lambert (Cartwright), who does not. The second is useless, teary-eyed, and easily panicked. She is a traditionally weak, frightened woman. She giggles at a lewd double entendre made by one of the boys, but the strong female would not. (We laugh at things when we’re scared that we wouldn’t normally laugh at; considering that the crew has already been through a lot by this point, Parker’s vulgar levity can be seen as an attempt to lighten Lambert’s mood, more jovial than offensive, and consistent with his character.) Lambert’s fate is to be a victim, to be “raped” to death. Although the film is not so explicit, we do see the beast creep its (her?) tail between Lambert’s legs before we hear her die. While Kane is “raped” orally and for reproductive purposes, Lambert is “raped” via the traditional route, and it is a power-oriented act.
Ripley, however, is stronger, or at least wants to be stronger. Third-in-command, she is a hard-ass or, in the words of men everywhere forced to take orders from women, “a bitch.” She refuses to let the infected astronauts back onboard the “Nostromo” for fear that the rest of the crew might perish. Her orders are ignored by her inferior, Ash (Holm), who throughout the film is more likely to bend Captain Dallas’ (Skerritt) ear than she is. Her female authority is undercut, and not even by a real man, but by a fake man, a robot. Her other attempts to reassert her authority do not go well. She is “all talk” and no action, and when the android attempts to murder her, it is by trying to shove a magazine into her mouth. In case this oral imagery is not clear enough, he attempts to do so with a dirty magazine while she is enshrined in pornographic images (he throws her into the bunk or cubicle of one of the male crew members, who has pasted smutty pictures on the wall). These three females—Ripley, Lambert, the alien—do not get along well, the humans with the alien for biological reasons, but the two human women are at odds because of their different attitudes, because of how they want to “take care of the boys.” The men in the movie get along much better. Ash and Parker fight at one point, but in the Director’s Cut Lambert hits Ripley much earlier in the movie, leaving an animosity that long outlasts Parker’s battle with Ash. Ripley’s fate at the film’s end can be seen as that of all strong-willed women, to live alone in what’s left of a Gothic mansion, with no company except that of a housecat.
How’s this for gender-bending? The computer’s name is Mother, fair enough, yet in the traditional sense, it is really more of a Father. Wait, you say, isn’t Captain Dallas the father of the crew, our surrogate family? Dallas, with his sighing, tired leadership is more of a big brother than a father. We see him alone and moody, listening to a Mozart adagio, like a teenage boy locked in his room with the stereo on. He is ineffectual against the creature and is outwitted in a head-on conflict. If he is not emasculated already when the film begins, he is certainly emasculated by the time we see him locked in the alien’s harem cocoon. Mother/Father is all-powerful and always watching. It tells the crew what to do, yet it is remote and inaccessible to all but one member of the crew; it “can’t be bothered” with the day-to-day running of the ship, and it is only consulted in cases of extreme importance, like a 1950s suburban patriarch.
“Crew Expendable”
Mother/Father’s secret mission all along has been to bring back the alien alive, without thought for the human crew. When Mother/Father betrays the family and reveals its preference for the alien, “Alien” has its cake and eats it to: it caters to male fears and female fears. It does the first when Mother proves to be treacherous, yet the exact same action can be seen through the lens of female dread as a Father proving to be treacherous and blaming it on Mother by using her name. From the female’s view, the “woman” (the name of Mother) has been used and discarded for the “man’s” (Father, the computer’s “real” identity) convenience.
And why shouldn’t the machine parent prefer the alien to its human offspring? They are lazy, vulgar, cigarette-smoking bums, making a mess of the ship and breaking it with sloppy landing procedures. (This is why the text-only “crew biographies,” available as an extra on one of the many DVD versions of “Alien,” are so awful. The biographies make each member of the crew out as being “the best of the best,” as having led truly noteworthy lives by rescuing hostages, inventing things, and solving various emergencies, instead of the average joes they are in the movie.) As Ash explains, when his machine-ness has been revealed, he admires the beast’s mechanical efficiency and its devotion to survival without “delusions of morality.” His words could just as well belong to Mother/Father or the company that built them. The company is so enamored with efficiency and productivity that when it discovers a creature of pure efficiency—the beast can apparently generate bodymass from nothingness—it falls in love and is willing to sacrifice its humanity to possess it. In his article “Children of the Light,” Bruce F. Kawin puts the predicament of the crew like this:
“…the humans are presented as trapped between an efficient monster and a monstrously efficient military-industrial complex. The computer…is addressed as ‘You bitch!’ when she supports the company, protects the robot, and takes her self-destruct program a bit too far; the monster is the ‘son’ of the ‘bitch.’ The threat behind all of these is an organization that values military efficiency and heartless strength more than human life and love.”
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