CHAPTER 5
In late June 1979, eleven years after the release of Rosemary’s Baby, six years after The Exorcist and the Roe decision, and three years after The Omen hit theaters, Ridley Scott released one of the most important feminist films of the 1970s: Alien.
In the film, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and her shipmates find themselves under siege by a malevolent, ferocious, and nearly indestructible alien that they bring back to their interstellar freighter, the Nostromo, while exploring a desolate planet called LV-426. With its iconic visual and sound design, Ridley Scott’s nimble and experimental direction, and a staggeringly simple but compelling storyline, this film was, like the others in this book, immensely successful in its theatrical release.
The film cost a reported $11 million to make but grossed nearly $80 million in the US and an additional £8 million in the UK. People loved this movie in 1979, and they have loved it ever since.
The core reasons for its enduring popularity, however, aren’t about the design or the direction so much as they are about the blazing feminism of the film. On the Nostromo, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley winds up being the sole crewmate to survive the alien’s attack, and she survives by a combination of physical strength, strategic cunning, and technical know-how. She’s no shrinking violet, and she’s no victim. She’s a powerhouse, a fighter, a survivor. She is helped by her crewmates at various points, but, in the end, Ripley makes it through of her own sheer willpower, resourcefulness, and bravery. For all these reasons, Alien has gone down in history as the apotheosis of feminist horror. As well it should.
Though no one who has seen the film would ever contest that the film is feminist in nature, its signal contribution to the feminism of the domestic horror genre has not been fully explored.
Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, and The Omen, Alien speaks to—or, better, screams about— the horror of reproductive coercion, domestic violence, and women’s lack of equality in American law and society.
To be more specific, Alien imagines a world in which (1) reproductive violence is the point of origin for horror, (2) the people you live with seek to abuse and brutalize your body and hijack your reproductive agency, and (3) the only path out is to become a warrior.
That last element-the image of the warrior-woman for which Sigourney Weaver as Ripley is so rightly renowned—feels particularly powerful when we consider the social fears of that time. When the film was released, America was still in the throes of its debate around the ERA and Roe v. Wade. So, before we drill into the film, I want to set the stage culturally, by reminding us what was going on at the end of the 1970s.
By 1979, when Alien was released, Roe v. Wade was on the rocks. Two potential presidential candidates for the 1980 elections were openly antiabortion: Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Morton Downey Jr.
Gallup polls conducted in 1979 revealed that, even with the legalization of abortion and the concomitant massive reduction in maternal mortality, only 22 percent of the American population thought abortion should be legal in all circumstances, 54 percent thought it should be legal in some circumstances, and 19 percent thought it should be illegal.
For the second half of the ’70s, then, only about 80 percent of Americans thought abortion should ever be legal, and the large majority of those believed it should be legal only in specific circumstances.
Going deeper into Americans’ feelings on abortion, the 1979 Gallup poll showed that, whereas 78 percent of Americans believed abortion should be legal when the mother’s life was in danger during the first three months of pregnancy, only 59 percent believed it should be legal when the mother’s life was in danger in the last three months.
In the year Alien was released, then, 41 percent of polled Americans thought that, starting at six months of gestation, the fetus’s life outweighed the mother’s, full stop.
These polls make clear the American public’s deeply divided views on abortion at that time. On the sixth anniversary of the Roe decision, January 22, 1979, sixty thousand antiabortionists marched on Washington, chanting “Life, life, life!” An abortion clinic on Long Island was demonstrated at by antiabortionists numerous times in 1978 alone; in 1979, seeing that the demonstrations had done very little to shut down the clinic, a man simply set the clinic on fire.
Democratic President Jimmy Carter looked to hire health advisors who were known to be antiabortion. 1979 saw increasing conflicts even in very liberal states, like New York, about the use of public funds to support abortion.
Federal financial support for abortions was virtually nonexistent, creating a severe access problem for poor women who sought to terminate pregnancies. Abortion may have been federally legalized, but its status as a “right” available to all American women, regardless of status, income, or profession, was far from settled.
Alien begins to signal its affiliation with and interest in the women’s reproductive rights movement subtly but early on in the film.
After a long opening sequence in which the camera slowly surveys a silent, sleeping interstellar freighter, we see the main computer chirp to life. After that, the camera continues its survey and finally stops with a shot of a crew of people asleep in hypersleep beds. They are awakened because the computer has received an order from Earth directing them to explore the nearby planet LV-426. As the crew awakens, we see that the shipmates have a warm collegiality about them, functioning much like a family, with Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) as the de facto dad of a bunch of rambunctious siblings, and the ship computer functioning as the mother. The ship computer, in fact, is called Mother. Despite being way, way out in deep space, then, the Nostromo is cast as a domestic space.
When the sortie ship detaches from the Nostromo so that the exploring crew can check out the alien world beneath, Ripley, a lieutenant on the Nostromo, says “Umbilicus clear,” immediately invoking an idea of gestation and parturition. When the team then lands on the surface of the alien world, to do the salvage mission that Mother has set them on course for, they arrive at a structure that appears to be at least in part organic.
They enter into space that feminist scholar Barbara Creed rightly describes as a “gigantic, cavernous, malevolent womb.” The search party lowers crewman Kane (John Hurt) into a cave where it’s as hot “as the goddamn tropics.” Like the body temperature inside a birth canal, perhaps? And then, voilà, Kane finds a trove of eggs and falls down among them. While on the floor, he examines an egg.
He sees something alive and moving inside of it. It looks fetal. The egg opens.
Kane leans over it, curious, and the egg ejects an organism that pierces Kane’s helmet and appears to attach to his face. Not good news for Kane.
The sortie party drags Kane back to the ship, but Lieutenant Ripley, who is the commanding officer while Captain Dallas is in the away party, insists that they follow quarantine protocols. Kane, she avers, should not be allowed back on the ship; none of them know what the organism is or whether it’s contagious. Even when Dallas—again, the ship’s captain-orders her from the entry bay to let him and the others bring Kane in, she stands her ground and decisively tells him no. Our Ripley is one seriously rule-abiding officer.
Unfortunately for everyone, Ash—the chief science officer aboard the ship— is not so rule-abiding. He opens the bay door and allows the away party and the alien that’s affixed itself to Kane’s face free entry into the ship.
Once Kane has been taken back inside the Nostromo and his helmet is removed, we see a crablike creature attached to his face. The crew members, led by science officer Ash, scan Kane, producing a series of images that look like a sonogram, showing a system of organs running down Kane’s throat.
Ash warns Dallas that removing it might kill Kane, but Dallas wants to remove it anyway.
“You’ll take responsibility?” asks Ash. “Yes, yes, I’ll take responsibility,” replies Dallas. This language of “taking responsibility” clearly invokes the discourse around pregnancy and abortion from the vantage point of the man who impregnates the woman.
Of course, in the explicit logic of the narrative, what Dallas means is that he’ll take responsibility if Kane dies; he’ll be the one to make an account of things to anyone back on Earth, such as his employer, or Kane’s family.
But symbolically, we now realize what has happened here: Kane has been raped by an alien life-form that has impregnated him. Dallas is trying to make an abortion happen and is willing to accept the consequences if something goes wrong.
Perhaps not surprisingly, problems arise immediately when they try to remove the crablike alien and fail; it has “concentrated acid for blood” and tightens its tendrils’ grip around Kane’s throat so they can’t cut it off. They have no choice but to wait and see how this alien pregnancy will proceed, and whether Kane will survive.
Though set in outer space in the year 2122, the film offers up a fascinating and very timely meditation – both for 1979 and in our current era— on the dangers of forced pregnancy and forced birth.
Soon, however, it looks like things will work out for Kane. Overnight, of its own volition, the crab-alien creature releases him, dropping off and dying in a corner of the room. Kane revives, gets his bearings, and rejoins his compatriots. The crew returns to the center of their interstellar home, the kitchen and mess hall, happy that Kane has woken up with an appetite.
While they all eat together, the fraternal energy returns; everyone is chatting and laughing. During this scene, our eye is focused not on Ripley but squarely on Kane. In fact, by this point in the film, it’s not yet clear who the film’s hero and the focus of our empathy is supposed to be: could be Captain Dallas, could be Lieutenant Ripley, could be Kane.
We watch Kane eating and smiling in relief. But something changes. Suddenly, he looks surprised, then very afraid.
Quickly, his expression turns to agony, and his body starts twisting and contorting as something tries to push its way through his abdomen.
The camera position shifts. We are watching him from behind, suddenly, just over his shoulder-very much the position from which many people watch their wives, girlfriends, or partners deliver a baby. Then Kane is shifted so that he’s lying on the table-again, an iconographic reference to labor and delivery: Women often sit partially upright during delivery, up until the point that it becomes clear that they need surgical intervention and they are moved to the operating table.
As we watch Kane, lying face up on the dinner table, get torn apart from the inside by his alien baby, he is the center of our field of vision; he is the locus of our empathy and of our horror.
The spidery alien’s offspring pushes out of him, much as a human baby pushes its way out of its mother. The scene is often referred to as the “chest-burster scene,” but it should properly be called the “abdomen-burster scene” because the alien baby clearly comes through the soft tissue of Kane’s body, not through his sternum or ribs.
Throughout Kane’s agonizing and lethal delivery of the alien baby, Ripley is visually sidelined, located in the background of the shot, in parallel depth of field with other crew members.
The scene is entirely focused on Kane, his body, and how it gets torn to pieces. Throughout the scene viewers are painfully aware that whatever is in him has no way out, except right through his abdominal wall.
The alien baby looks horrifying: yellowish, but covered in blood, with a small round skull, two black eyes positioned on the side of its head, atop a gaping mouth set with razor-sharp teeth.
Unsurprisingly, the alien baby’s allegorical meaning has been discussed widely since the film’s release.
Members of the film’s cast describe it as “a penis with teeth.” Similarly, scholar James Kavanagh said in 1980, “Kane dies in agony enduring the forced ‘birth’ of the razor-toothed phallic monster that gnaws its way through his stomach into the light—a kind of science-fiction phallus dentatus.”
Without a huge amount of visual justification, the scholar Barbara Creed posits the alien baby represents the Freudian vagina dentata.
That’s fine, to go all Freudian on it, but both the phallus and vagina readings miss the forest for the teeth. Apart from the teeth, the creature looks more like an earlystage human fetus than anything else. It’s clearly not human, but it is more than a little bit anthropoid.
The alien baby has a rounded head at the top of its body. Its flesh is slightly yellowish but recognizably within the realm of imaginable human skin colors.
It has a mouth with a horizontal jaw in two parts, two eyes on either side of its head, two short arm structures. We are dealing with aliens, here, let’s not forget. It would be reasonable for them to have no arms and no legs, no head and no eyes. But this little alien baby is bipedal, like a person-when it runs off the table, it runs on its hind legs. It does also have a bony-looking tail, but that needn’t disqualify the comparison to a human fetus, since human fetuses have tails for a period of time in the womb, early in gestation. In fact, some human babies are born with the fetal tail still attached. Honestly, the alien looks like a human fetus that is somehow arrested in its development, but makes it out of the host’s body alive anyway. And has teeth. The alien baby is an uncanny little fetus monster.
Ash later recognizes this explicitly, referring to the offspring as “Kane’s son,” an obvious pun on the sin-riddled biblical Cain, from whom sinful peoples issue forth in Genesis. The idea here is that this brutal alien baby will augur in a new race of evil, wicked beings if it’s allowed to reach Earth onboard the Nostromo.
In staging Kane’s rape, pregnancy, and lethal birth, the film allegorizes the sociopolitical issues surrounding abortion legislation in the United States in the 1970s. Remember, early attempts to change abortion laws focused on the idea that rape victims should be allowed to terminate pregnancies, even if other women could not. Although male, Kane is a rape victim, and he dies from his alien impregnation. The extraterrestrial impregnation of Kane and his subsequent death lay bare a fundamental inequality back on Earth: men are not asked to carry unwanted pregnancies nor to risk their lives in order to give birth. But in Alien, we bear witness to a reality in which a man gets raped and impregnated and then dies during birth.
The horror of this film isn’t just about women’s bodies but about men’s, too, asking male viewers to imagine a world in which they had no agency over their reproductive lives, even when their lives were, in point of fact, on the line. Unthinkable! Unless you were, of course, a woman.
Many scholars who study this film, even from the vantage point of feminism, assume Ripley is the epicenter of the audience’s empathic allegiances. And that is generally true, and is certainly true toward the end of the film. But in the scene where Kane gives birth to the alien, we identify not with Ripley but with Kane himself.
Alien urges viewers to imagine a world in which reproductive violence could be committed against men and could be lethal. Indeed, after Kane dies, two other male crew members follow him: Captain Dallas and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton).
This violent alien species isn’t just targeting women—in fact, it doesn’t seem to be targeting women at all. It doesn’t care about the sex or gender of the body it penetrates. All it needs is a warm, safe abdomen to gestate in.
Adding depth and nuance to its interstellar assault on the antiabortion movement, Alien has its own take on and treatment of domestic violence and how it relates to forced pregnancy.
Ripley soon finds out that Ash, the science officer, is somehow colluding with the company that funds their voyage to bring the alien back, with or without the crew alive.
Typing furiously into Mother, she discovers that the ship was rerouted deliberately to the planet where the alien species was found, so that Ash could bring back a specimen of this new life-form.
“Priority one,” Mother informs Ripley, is to “insure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.” Expendable. That’s a painfully on-the-nose way of talking about 41 percent of Americans’ attitudes toward women late in pregnancy in 1979.
The deaths of Kane, Dallas, and Brett had all been costs the company was happy to incur in order to bring this infinitely valuable alien fetus to life safely.
Raging against the literal and metaphorical machine that she realizes has condemned them all to be vessels for violent and lethal reproduction, Ripley demands an explanation from Ash. Realizing she won’t be satisfied by anything he says, she stalks off to find the other two surviving crew members, hoping to warn them.
But Ash isn’t going to let her. He seals her into a section of the ship with him, locking her into a small corner of their shared domestic space. He stands in the doorway, still as a stone, with a terrifyingly impassive face, which we see in extreme close-up.
Eventually, Ripley sees what we see: He has a laceration along his hairline, and white fluid is slowly leaking from it. Ash isn’t human; he’s an android, a machine, like Mother, in thrall to the larger machine of the corporation that would gladly sacrifice the entire crew in order to bring home an alien baby.
His expression still cold and hard, Ash starts brutally beating Ripley, ripping her hair out in huge clumps. He throws her to the ground; he slams her into furniture. She tries to escape by crawling across the floor, the camera zoomed in on her panicking, pain-stricken face. Next, Ash grabs her by her clothes and throws her across the room into a wall. She loses consciousness for a second; during that time, the camera rotates around Ash’s face, and we see how unmoved he is, unremorseful, unfeeling. As she starts to come to, he throws her again. She screams as she hits the wall and then loses consciousness again as she collapses to the floor.
This is a scene of frank domestic battery: Ash has shifted from being chief science and medical officer to being a domestic abuser, violently assaulting a woman whom he, until this moment, has lived with in relative peace on board the Nostromo. He assaults her because he wants to use her as a host for another alien spawn. Through this scene, Alien recognizes that the desire to control women’s reproductive lives can—and does, all too often—result in other forms of domestic abuse, much as it had in Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen.
Fundamentally, what all domestic horror films understand is that the dehumanization of women is the problem, the source of the Horrific. Rape, forced pregnancy, forced birth, domestic violence, coercion – these are all social practices predicated on the notion that the victim is not fully human and is not, therefore, deserving of the full rights and privileges of safety and self-determination.
Ash doesn’t see Ripley as deserving of basic human rights; he sees her as a vehicle for transporting the aliens back to Earth. Ash represents, then, another layer in the structures of power that support the sexual and physical oppression of women. Ash has neither interest in nor capacity to understand Ripley’s – or Kane’s, for that matter – humanity, because he is programmed simply to support the directives that come into Mother from the human companies and industries back home.
All these horrific dynamics come into sharp relief when Ash tries to stuff a rolled-up newspaper down Ripley’s throat while she’s passed out from the savagery of his beatings. At first, it seems he may simply be trying to kill her.
But remember that it’s via the throat that the embryos are implanted, and that it’s Ash’s job is to bring the aliens back to Earth. Through this penetration of her mouth by the newspaper, he’s trying to prep her for forcible impregnation by an alien. He’s trying to force Ripley to carry a pregnancy she does not want, a pregnancy that will kill her.
The fact that he shoves a rolled-up periodical down her throat deserves extra scrutiny. In deep space, the crew of the Nostromo is ten months from home, which means they’ve been away from home for at least that long already. So what good is a periodical? Who reads magazines and newspapers that are almost two years old other than archivists, scholars, and hoarders?
But it makes sense symbolically. The news was where the war about reproductive freedom and violence was largely fought. Ash is trying to silence Ripley by forcing media down her throat. The scene is an absolute triumph of allegorical sophistication about the precarity of women’s reproductive status in the US and about the role of the media in determining that status.
Amidst this violence, two of Ripley’s shipmates, Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), the only other surviving members of the crew, band together to defeat and destroy Ash. Over the course of the battle scene, Ash is ripped to pieces but continues to fight back, at one point pinning Parker—a large man—to the ground, with his own groin jammed up against Parker’s. Visually, what we’re seeing here is a male robot appearing to attempt to rape a male human. Parker is saved when Lambert grabs a highly phallic looking metal pipe and rams it into Ash. Again, the film asks viewers to imagine a world in which men are equally vulnerable to sexual violence and forced pregnancy, to chilling effect. The catch line from trailers of the film in 1979 was “In space, no one can hear you scream.” That’s right: exactly like screaming in your own home. But this time, the men are screaming, too, right along with Ripley and Lambert.
Together, the three remaining human survivors attempt to outwit the aliens but to no avail: Parker and Lambert soon get killed by the now-giant alien baby (evidently, its rate of growth far outpaces that of humans).
Ripley realizes she must survive and escape the alien on her own. To do this, she transforms herself into a warrior. She ties back her luscious, curly hair into a ponytail. She carries a huge flame-throwing weapon under her arm. She sneaks around the ship like some kind of futuristic Navy SEAL, attempting to be silent as she moves through the mostly dark ship-availing herself of her slender build to maneuver around dark corners in murky passages. When she has to move fast, she runs hard, not gracefully, grunting and grasping. Ripley’s not trying to look pretty; she’s trying to survive.
She soon realizes that the ship itself may be her best weapon—perhaps she can set it to self-destruct and propel herself toward home in an escape pod. To do this, she engages the ship’s self-destruct mechanism to detonate and destroy Mother and the entire Nostromo.
Ripley’s transformation from cautious, rule-abiding officer to bold, rule-breaking warrior over the course of the film, coupled with her symbolic decision, at the end, to destroy Mother, points to the final profound feminist critique that the film makes. And that critique has everything to do with the ERA and with what the ERA promised (or threatened) to do for women by 1979.
hexafu 