Is “Alien” ultimately misogynist?
In addition to more obvious overtones about capitalism gone out of control, is “Alien” about reactionary fears of powerful women? Is the alien the ultimate powerful woman and is Ripley cast as the single, divorced, lonely mother (facts we find out in the sequel), deciding the fate of a race of spineless men? Or does the series empower women by handing the fate of the species over to them? The movie empowers women while simultaneously playing off their fears of becoming marginalized, unimportant, and of being left to face life alone after standing up for themselves. Or the movie may simply be playing off our natural, inherent fears of rape and the gruesomeness of child birth. But does any of this lead anywhere? It certainly doesn’t lead anywhere as clearly as James Cameron’s 1986 sequel “Aliens.” That movie’s lesson is more clear and concise: mankind has reduced outer space to a mere consumer product, to be exploited, and not as an object of wonder. God, therefore, punishes mankind’s arrogance with a race of killing machines (remember, the grabbing hands of capitalist exploitation were a big concern of the 1980s). But that’s one of the differences between science-fiction (“Aliens”) and horror (“Alien”). Kawin describes the differences between horror and sci-fi in this way:
“…what they [horror stories] often map out is the terrain of the unconscious, and in that connection they often deal with fantasies of brutality, sexuality, victimization, repression, and so on…because they deal with the unconscious…they often involve some disguised journey into the Jungian territory of the land of the dead…What science-fiction films do, in contrast, is to address not the unconscious but the conscious—if not exactly the scientist in us, then certainly the part of the brain that enjoys speculating on technology, gimmicks, and the perfectible future.”
And therein lies the big difference in tone between “Alien” and “Aliens” (which I mentioned at the beginning of my review): the themes of “Aliens,” because it is a sci-fi adventure, can be drawn together to form a lesson we can carry with us, because it is a movie directed, in part, at our reasoning side. The complexity of “Aliens” revolves around guns, gimmicks, how the far-off colony functions technically. But “Alien” is horror, merely using the language of science-fiction. Its spaceship is a Gothic mansion, its crew is its family, its alien is its ghost or demon, its flame-throwers are its torches. Only its motion trackers seem to be a genuinely, irreplaceable sci-fi gimmick. Or, as Kawin puts it, “in comparison with the power of that theme [‘the organization that values military efficiency and heartless strength more than human life’], the space travel setting does not have much weight.”
Perhaps “Alien” makes no particular point and is just about exploiting our subconscious fears, not intending for us to change our attitudes or learn anything, but to simply have shocks and thrills cut more deeply. (One of my wife’s professors has a theory that the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is about the gasoline shortage of the 1970s.) Perhaps a cheap trick of all horror movies, no matter how great they are, is that these complexities of our souls are used so trivially, to augment a cheap thrill. We get two scares for the price of one. But maybe a good jarring of our deeply-held fears is healthy now and again. Kawin feels that good horror films function “as a mirror or series of mirrors in which aspects of the self demand to be confronted.” Certainly the role of men and women is a topic worth confronting, and the movie asks, by way of its convoluted gender-bending, is technology and merciless capitalism damaging the family unit beyond repair? “Alien,” because it is a horror film, does not provide an answer. Science-fiction might. But horror films are about the dread of the question.
P.S. Bad horror films, according to Kawin,
“present a spectacle for the simple purpose of causing pain in the viewer’s imagination—not just scaring the hell out of us, or us into hell, but attacking and brutalizing us on a deep level…and teach us nothing of value.”
The chief characteristic of most horror movies released in the last two decades is that they suck. They are pointless and gory. Perhaps that’s the idea: that we live lives of ennui and that the unspoken, second layer of the movie is that an aimless, meaningless death, for distracting entertainment, is the appropriate end for an aimless, meaningless life, crammed with distracting entertainment. Modern irony and distrust of larger enterprises lead us to turning inward, to personal and domestic hygiene and fitness. In an age of so much increased cleanliness and finickiness, the thought of our inescapably dirty insides—and I don’t mean metaphorically—is our number-one fear. Modern gore-fests exploit this by cutting open one beautiful person after another. People who have tried so hard to maintain their personal cleanliness are now having to confront the nastiness of internal organs and bodily functions. But I think this gives “Freddy vs. Jason” more credit than it’s worth.
Finished November 13th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "Extra-Terrestrial Gender Bending"
Back to home.
Page two of "Extra-Terrestrial Gender Bending"