The late 1970s were a dark time for women’s efforts to secure equal rights in the United States. After the ERA zoomed through federal channels of approval, it had stalled in a small but intractable group of states. And there it withered, until 1979, when it had to either pass or be killed. Jimmy Carter would give the ERA an extension of three years—a sort of Hail Mary that somehow, someone might convince a few states to endorse women’s having equal rights under the law-until 1982.
Significantly, Alien was made before Carter granted the extension, in a sociopolitical environment in which the collapse of the ERA seemed not only probable but imminent. In fact, Alien wrapped about the same time as the ERA’s first drop-dead date, which was March 22, 1979.
The popular perception, endorsed by both the right and the left, was that the ERA could do three signal things to change American ways of life.
First, it could protect women’s reproductive freedoms. Second, it could change the structure and function of the American nuclear family. The third powerful lifestyle change the ERA portended was to expand the role and participation of women in the US military.
Specifically, the ERA was understood as a bill that could result in women being eligible for active combat situations in military service. The ERA promised – or threatened, depending on your perspective— the idea of an American armed forces staffed in part by women warriors.
It’s the third lifestyle element of the ERA that I want to focus on now – the military part—and how that element was operationalized in American news media by 1979.
Mainstream newspaper coverage during the ’70s noted that “the E.R.A. would require that the full range of military activities, including combat duty, be open to women.”
Proponents of the ERA pointed out that, since women had historically been banned from combat situations, they were also, in practice, debarred from promotions to the higher-ranking offices in the US military. There was a glass ceiling, in terms of both pay and rank, because they couldn’t be in active combat. Proponents argued that the ERA would make it easier for women to enter into combat situations and prove themselves as warriors so that they could climb the professional ladder.
Opponents of the ERA emphasized that women would be in combat situations, on the front lines, and would be coming home in body bags.
Opponents didn’t feel comfortable entrusting the safety of fellow soldiers to women, who they claimed could not hoist an injured fellow across a battlefield nor manage a heavy modern gun with sufficient skill to kill an enemy combatant.
In 1975, states started to reject the ERA because of fears that it would make women eligible for the draft. In fact, in 1978, when Alien was being planned and shot, women were still restricted in the Air Force and barred from most naval vessels.
A 1979 op-ed entitled “The Case Against Women in Combat,” ran in the Times only months before Alien hit theaters. The article opens with deliberately acerbic images of “Marine coeds bunking down in bivouacs in combat zones” and teenage girls in helmets “charging over beaches under fire with bayonets fixed.” The article goes on to say, “Such images may seem sheer fantasy-the farthest shores of radical feminism or an arresting montage for a futuristic film. Until recently, in fact, the military services and some factions of the women’s liberation movement have dismissed the idea of warrior roles for women as ‘unthinkable.” The article went on to talk about how one argument in favor of allowing women into combat roles lay in the changing nature of military technology: If “combat will no longer depend on bayonets and physical force-rather on lasers, microprocessors, and other sophisticated devices that render obsolete the conventional images of battle,” then maybe, maybe there would be no problem with women in combat, because “in the future, there will be no front lines.” But, the piece goes on, to think in these ways is naive and dangerous to national security. Favoring women with higher school test scores over men with higher baseline aggression and physical strength is to undervalue the qualities necessary for battle success.
And, really, for success in general: “Almost every study of productivity in American industry or of success in the economy, as well as of courage in combat, has shown that the intangibles of character-enterprise, aggression, drive, willingness to risk are much more important than the measurable quotients of classroom ability.”
So, smart women should step right on back, because undereducated, aggressive men really are better suited to military action. The Times article concludes by pointing out that “the ancient tradition against the use of women in combat embodies the deepest wisdom of the human race.” The deepest wisdom of the human race. Well, released six months after that article ran in the Times, Alien would hotly contest that deepest wisdom.
Ripley is the only character who keeps her head clear throughout the entire film. She was in fact the only one who tried to prevent Kane from reentering the Nostromo once he had been in contact with the unknown life-form on LV -426. She ordered the away team to stay outside and follow twenty-four-hour quarantining procedure.
It was Ash – the traitorous, violent corporate android – who overrode her orders and let Kane back on board the ship. Put otherwise, it was Ripley’s level-headed respect for rules and honoring of rank – as she says, when Dallas is off-ship, she is the highest-ranking person on the ship, and makes the decisions-that could have protected the crew. Ripley is the one who later devises a plan to leave the Nostromo via the shuttle and detonate and destroy the ship with the alien inside it. It is Ripley who single-handedly keeps the alien at bay with a flamethrower and makes it onto her shuttle. It is Ripley who fights the thing, cleverly squeezing herself into a space suit so that she can blast the alien out of the air lock without depriving herself of oxygen in the process. Ripley is the best warrior in the film, and it’s not because she’s the strongest, the most aggressive, or the most willing to tolerate risk; it’s because she’s the smartest.
Throughout the film, Ridley Scott showcases Ripley’s suitedness to military service. We see her wielding guns, managing a complex starship’s self-destruct controls, piloting a small getaway ship, and obliterating an alien invader. She’s doing exactly what anti-ERA advocates in the 1970s said women couldn’t be expected to do in the armed forces. She is the armed forces. Ripley stands as proof that women could not only perform active combat service but think more clearly and execute complex battle plans more successfully than their fellows.
Alien is a parable about the dangers of dehumanizing women, a parable that suggests, ultimately, that a society that seeks to oppress women has something to be afraid of. And it’s not (just) the alien. It’s Ellen Ripley that society needs to fear. Because Ellen Ripley is going to turn around and detonate not only the alien but Mother, the ship that symbolizes dehumanization and entrapment in the home, the ship that embodies the imprisonment of women in a complex web of power and patriarchy from which they themselves are largely excluded. Ripley would rather float in an escape pod through the blackness of space, hoping to get picked up, than be trapped in the hell of domestic violence and reproductive abuse.
Interestingly, some mainstream reviewers completely missed the point of the film upon its release. Janet Maslin, in an unusually tone-deaf review, complained that Alien wasn’t “fun.” That’s fair enough, but Alien isn’t trying to be “fun.” It’s a radical feminist film trying to make all viewers-male and female-feel the kind of profound sexual and physical vulnerability to assault that hundreds of thousands of American women were subjected to in their own homes every year.
Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian that the “values” of Alien weren’t very “enlightening.” Malcolm was perhaps not ready to grasp the magnitude of this film’s feminist ambition.
One very prominent and influential person very clearly did grasp it—all of it. That was filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the sequel to Alien seven years later. As horror sequels go, this film is exemplary. Its central strength is that Cameron is an excellent reader of Scott’s film, reenacting and accentuating some of its most important conceptual dynamics.
Aliens opens with Ripley, again in hypersleep, being found by a deep salvage team. When she comes to, it’s revealed that she’s been floating in space for fifty-seven years. Everyone she knows on Earth is gone, so she is desperately alone. She can’t get a job because she blew up the Nostromo, and there’s no physical evidence of the alien that she says necessitated that decision. Quite the contrary, as she learns, there now is a colony of “sixty or seventy families” terraforming the planet (LV-426) that the derelict alien vessel was on; no complaints of a violent alien.
She tells a corporate tribunal about the nature of the alien, and the members don’t believe her, instead mocking her story that the alien is “a creature that gestates inside a living human host.”
Ripley, in her narrative to them, amplified the maternity of the creature, the idea of gestation. And no one believed her. How shocking: a woman reports rape and forcible impregnation and is not believed by those in power to help her.
But suddenly, soon after Ripley has told her story to the corporate tribunal that’s assessing her actions, the colonists on the planet become uncontactable.
Ripley is asked by a corporate agent to return as a consultant for what will now be a purely seek-and-destroy mission, headed by an elite squad of soldiers. Ripley will be safely removed from any combat situations, they assure her, since shell be surrounded by professional soldiers, rather than by her old shipmates, who were soldiers of necessity on the Nostromo. Ripley is terrified to go, altogether too familiar with what the alien species is capable of. Plus, she is well aware that the alien egg Kane was forcibly impregnated by was one of dozens of eggs on LV-426. What ultimately convinces her to return is that, since she awoke from her long hypersleep, she has suffered from night terrors she can’t shake. She decides that confronting the aliens and destroying all of them is the only way for her to heal, so she joins the expedition.
Since this is the future, where women presumably do have equal rights, including rights to be military combatants, two of the soldiers that will accompany Ripley are women: Vasquez and Ferro. Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) is a muscular and fierce woman, styled to appear masculine by 1980s standards. Early on, in fact, one of her male colleagues says, “Hey, Vasquez. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” And she replies, without missing a beat, “No, have you?” Burn. So, well before we see any actual combat, the film has called attention to Vasquez’s status as female, and she has changed the terms of the conversation by insisting that only a man deficient in and insecure about his masculinity would ask a woman warrior whether she was mistaken for a man. Seeing that she is extremely good at verbal battle, we are immediately eager to see how Vasquez will do in combat situations, which she is amped and ready for. The other woman soldier, Corporal Ferro (Colette Hiller), is a combat pilot. So, we have two women who fulfill two functions that opponents to the ERA had been most concerned about women being allowed to fulfill: active combat and flight. Clearly, this film is going to make certain claims about the suitedness to having women in the military.
Cameron doesn’t just amplify the women-in-the-military aspect from the first film. He also amplifies the forced pregnancy dynamic. After Ripley, the soldiers, and the corporate liaison Burke (Paul Reiser) have landed on LV-426, they encounter a huge number of aliens, as well as a very young girl named Newt who survived the carnage among the settlers.
Burke, hoping to bring an alien specimen back to Earth for study, tries to entrap Ripley and Newt into being impregnated by an alien. Ripley reveals his treachery to the soldiers, saying, “He figured that he could get an alien back through quarantine if one of us was impregnated… nobody would know about the embryos we were carrying.” Impregnated. Embryos we were carrying. The gender politics of the second film are less subtle than in Alien—in this film, a human male explicitly tries to force two human females to become “impregnated.”
Now that the aliens have found the humans on the ship, the soldiers are picked off one by one. The hypermasculine Hudson, who had earlier cast aspersions on Vasquez’s femaleness, ends up getting pulled through a floor panel by the aliens, screaming “Fuck you!” all the while. Immediately after that, Vasquez helps rescue a fellow soldier and then single-handedly takes out half a dozen aliens before retreating. Then, as the survivors try to escape through the ventilation system, Vasquez-again single-handedly-holds oft the alien horde, giving the others some extra time to flee. Eventually, as she retreats into the vent system, Vasquez gets alien acid blood on her leg, incapacitating her. One of her teammates tries to help her, but they both get trapped together and decide to blow themselves up with a grenade so that their deaths will at least also involve taking out another wave of aliens.
Vasquez is the bravest, most tactical, strongest, and most self-sacrificing of the soldiers. Take that, ERA opponents.
By the final scenes, only Ripley, Newt, a benign android named Bishop, and Ripley’s love interest, Hicks (Michael Biehn), survive – though Hicks is badly wounded. Newt gets separated from the rest and is trapped and cocooned by one of the aliens.
Ripley gets Hicks to Bishop and returns to find Newt on her own. Like Vasquez, Ripley is shown to be braver, more team-oriented, more tactical, and more self-sacrificing than any of the men around her. Once again, take that, ERA opponents. Ripley finds and rescues Newt, only to encounter the alien progenitrix alone. When this happens, Ripley realizes that she needs some technological advantage, so she straps herself into a heavy-machinery loading device, which functions essentially as an exoskeleton for her. She battles the alien progenitrix in hand-to-hand combat, again proving her worth as a soldier and combat tactician. Ripley knows she has to become more than human in order to defeat the alien progenitrix, and she does that. In the end, however, it’s not her exoskeleton but her intelligence that wins out. She defeats the mother alien— again—by blowing her out the air lock.
As I said, James Cameron was an excellent reader of Ridley Scott’s film.
Even so, Cameron does dampen some of Scott’s feminist critiques. First, even though Ripley is still unquestionably a righteous warrior in this film, Aliens makes Ripley’s military exceptionalism a tiny bit less exceptional than it was in Alien—she requires her massive metal exoskeleton and a team, including Hicks, Vasquez, and Bishop.
To be sure, in the original film, Lambert and Parker were there to help her, but not through to the end. She had to figure out her ultimate exit strategy entirely on her own. In Aliens, she’s got a little girl, a new boyfriend, and a supportive (if severely damaged) android egging her on and helping her survive.
Indeed, in the final part of the fight sequence between Ripley and the Queen Alien, it’s Bishop the android’s quick thinking and quicker reflexes that keep Newt from being sucked into outer space. The message of the second film is clear: however fierce you are, you can’t make it without a team.
Second, in Cameron’s sequel, Ripley is made into a mother. She takes charge of young Newt, and most of the second half of the film focuses on Ripley’s desire to protect her. In doing this, the second film recurs to a far more traditional take on women’s roles and on what gives women power.
Indeed, in the final confrontation between the alien progenitrix and Ripley, Ripley screams at the alien, “Get away from her, you bitch!” taking on the role of angry, protective mama bear. It’s compelling, but it’s not the same Ripley that we met in the first film, isolated, fierce, indomitable, powerful, and unseduceable by either the claims of male attention or maternal desire. In the second film, it’s her desire to protect Newt that gives Ripley her final burst of bravery, the burst that’s required to dispatch the “bitch” alien once and for all.
In the first film, Ripley was allowed to remain a free agent, a warrior, and a survivor. Ripley survived, ultimately, by killing Mother, not by becoming a mother.
Ripley, in the end of the second film, is subjected to yet another feminist ambivalence: She’s allowed to be fierce, but her ferocity is both curbed and structured by her subjection to maternal feeling. The Ripley of Aliens is a safer, more recognizable type of woman than the Ripley of Alien.
She’s fierce and powerful, but she knows she needs her friends to help her and now her child survive.
Of course, from the standpoint of domestic violence survival, that’s almost always true.
It’s notoriously difficult for women – particularly women with children—to extricate themselves from situations of battery and domestic torture without third-party help, be that third party a lawyer, doctor, police officer, counselor, friend, family member, or colleague. For this realism about domestic violence, I can only commend Cameron. But on the other hand, this is part of why the original film –Alien—is so powerful and also so terrifying: Ripley is, like so many victims and survivors of domestic abuse, totally alone in the end. She has no backup. She has no one at all. And yet, somehow, she makes it through.
For that reason, I think it’s safe to say that, of all the domestic horrors in this book, Ridley Scott’s original Alien is in a strange way the most optimistic—naively optimistic, even. It has the most confidence in a woman’s power to overcome truly unthinkable peril and violence. It has confidence in the possibility for an individual woman – even a woman like Ripley, with no formal combat training-to find within herself a warrior. Moreover, she finds within herself the capacity not just to escape but actually to destroy the abuser that wanted to assault, rape, impregnate, and kill her. (Or I should say, abusers plural. We must never forget that Ash was at least as much of a problem for Ripley’s safety as was the stowaway alien.)
Whereas Rosemary was psychologically and spiritually destroyed by her rape and abuse, whereas Chris wound up a shattered and solemn woman, whereas Joanna ended up dead and replaced by a robot, and whereas Kathy ended up battered by her son and murdered by his hench-nanny, Ripley escapes, and she kills her tormentors.
Which, of course, is not an option for real women, living on planet Earth.
Quite the contrary, as legal scholars, advocates, and activists like Leigh Goodmark have argued, women who are proven survivors of catastrophic violence in the home, and who ultimately become violent against their tormentors, routinely find themselves serving long prison sentences.
As strange as it is to say, it appears that things are better for battered women in outer space than they are on Earth—at least in the sense that Ripley can actually rid herself of her tormentors forever, blowing up her ship and blasting her enemies into the void.
In real life, as many women survivors of violence know, and as the families of many victims of femicide know, there is no decisive, permanent way out.
Instead, most of the time, you move through the rest of your life knowing that the person who hurt you in the past could return, at any time, to hurt you again. Of course, the massive sequelization of Alien reminds us precisely of how tenacious the abuser can be, but at the end of the original film, as Ripley sails off into space asleep and all alone, there is a palpable relief and sense of safety, one we do not feel at the end of any other film we’ve discussed so far.
This is part of why Ellen Ripley becomes such a powerful archetype for feminist horror ever after. For one shimmering, silent, sleepy moment, alone in deep space, it seems that this violent alien has been put to rest for good.
The end is glorious, but it is also—very clearly – science fiction.
hexafu 