 Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton
Director: Ridley Scott
Year Of Release: 1979
Plot: The crew of the mining ship Nostromo answers a distress call from a ship on an uninhabited planet. Investigating they discover the crashed craft is deserted. They then find a room full of eggs, one of which hatches and attaches itself to a crewmember. After taking the injured man back to their spaceship, the creature drops off, only for the next stage of the lifeform to come bursting out of the crewmember’s chest a few hours later. The alien then starts to grow and begins attacking the crew, until it comes down to a battle between the now massive xenomorph and Ellen Ripley. |
It’s a fortunate coincidence that this feature in the Movie-A-Day series comes almost exactly 30 years after Alien was first released in the UK. It came out over here on September 6th, 1979, exciting audiences and setting up a franchise that has now endured for three decades.
There’s been a lot of talk over the years about whether Alien is about more than just a spaceship with an alien running around it. Over the years people have suggested that alongside Halloween and Friday The 13th it was one of the main prototypes for the slasher genre, or that it’s actually a science fiction film noir. Some have said it’s about the amorality of creation, capitalist exploitation, class division, or the inevitable repercussions of humanity's arrogance over the effect of technological advancement.
However what I’d like to suggest is that it’s actually about birth, rape and violation, and that the alien is just a giant penis with legs. You may think I’m just talking out of my ass, but I’m not the first person to note the sexual imagery in Alien, and you don’t get HR Giger to design your extraterrestrial if you don’t want sexual undertones. His art is absolutely packed with phallic and vaginal imagery, mixed with sci-fi trappings (it’s normally referred to as biomechanical art). After all, his 1973 painting, Work 219: Landscape XX, became part of an obscenity trial after the Dead Kennedys used it on one of their posters. The painting is more commonly known as ‘Penis Landscape’, which should give you an idea of what this canvas looks like.
It’s not just that the alien’s head looks like a giant phallus that suggests there’s sex lying under the surface of Alien. Just think about its mouth, which constantly drips white goo and has a smaller jawpiece that juts out to penetrate anything it wants to.
Beyond the look of the creature, there is also the plot and the alien’s lifecycle that suggests there’s more to Alien than meets the eye. Take the infamous facehugger as an example, a creature that attacks and subdues it victim, Kane, shoves itself down his throat and injects something there. It is essentially a male rape resulting in pregnancy. I’m also certainly not the first to compare the chestburster scene, when the results of the facehugger rape are realised, to a violent birth.
Although we’re meant to think of birth as something beautiful, it’s undoubtedly something that scares some people because of the pain and unknown quantity that it represents, and many have depicted it in art as a violent act, and this is what the scene plays on. The opening scene when the crew wake up from hypersleep is also a symbolic birth, although a much gentler one, when they come out of their egg-like wombs, and all four films have ended with shots of these pods and the protective space they represent.
After the chestbuster scene, Alien then continues as a series of attacks, with each death involving the person being penetrated with either the mouthparts or tail of a giant phallic monster. Veronica Cartwright’s death isn’t even particularly subtle about it, as it’s the first time we see the entire beast standing and that it looks like a muscular man with a giant penis-head. Then its tail curls up between her legs like a giant erection and impales her (the shots imply an anal rape). It’s here that for the first time the creature is revealed as not just a random killing machine, but a manifestation of unbridled and violent male sexuality. Indeed it’s almost like a sexual version of the monster from the id in Forbidden Planet.
However it’s not just from the alien itself that the idea of sexual violence comes through, as there are things such as the scene where the android Ash goes mental and tries to kill Ripley by rolling up a porn magazine and stuffing it down her throat.
Even at the end, the fact that the alien only reveals itself after Ripley strips down and is wearing the skimpiest panties in cinema history, suggests this is as much about sex as it is about scary monsters. It’s a tense scene as it is, but becomes even more unsettling when you realise what it’s really all about.
After Alien, the rape and birth imagery wasn’t really followed through with Aliens, although it did come back in Alien3. After Ripley realises she’s pregnant with an alien queen, she even explicitly states that she feels the facehugger violated her while she was in hypersleep. Then, at the end of the movie during her death (in the theatrical version, but interestingly not in the Special Edition cut), the alien bursts from her chest and while we know she wants to kill it, she does this by cradling it to her chest like a newborn baby. Again it’s idea of a violent birth. The threat of rape also permeates the entire film, although this time more from the human prisoners Ripley is amongst, rather than the alien itself.
We also see these themes in Alien: Resurrection, when the masculine sexuality re-emerges in the form of a part alien Ripley, which battles with her more feminine aspects. Every time she attacks someone, there are sexual undertones, such as her going for the genitals or wrapping her legs around somebody. That film even goes so far as to have a shot with Ripley lying on a mass of HR Giger-esque forms, with a massive thing that looks like an erection with a knife on the end sticking out between her legs. Ripley basically takes on the sexual aggression and masculine violence of the alien, which battles with the rational, human part of herself. The film is a bit of a mess in how it wants to deal with its themes, but it certainly takes on some of the sexual aspects of Alien.
If you think I’m just talking rubbish, watch Alien again and just look at the creature and particularly the deaths and see how much of it is about violent penetration and perversely sexualised imagery. The film realises how terrifying and deep rooted the fear of rape is, and uses its sci-fi trappings to use that to make its tale of interstellar horror even scarier.
TIM ISAAC
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NEXT: Aliens - Or, is the Alien series cinema's greatest franchise experiment?
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