Full disclosure: I’ve never seen Alien before this week.
Yes, I know, I know. I’m a member of Gen X, a Sigourney Weaver fan, and an afficianado of both science fiction and horror (not to mention the artwork of H.R. Giger) and I’ve never seen this movie until now.
Take a deep breath and let’s get over this travesty together, shall we?
This is not the time or place to discuss how much this film was built up to me and what I ultimately thought of its effectiveness when I finally watched it. What I want to discuss instead is a reading of the work that even one of its screenwriters acknowledges was one of his purposes.
The monster in Alien is the anxiety of threatened sexual assault.
In a documentary on the film, Dan O’Bannon stated explicitly that his goal with writing Alien was to write sexual horror, but with a twist:
I’m not going to go after the women in the audience, I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number. (Dietle)
There’s a lot to support this, of course, in the story of what happens to Officer Kane (John Hurt). He’s the first to awake from his sleep pod, he’s the first to encounter the alien’s first victim, first to try to assess and make contact with the living creature inside the alien egg, and the first to then be killed by the alien. However, he’s also the only victim to die from the reproductive process, and his death is the most horrific of any of Alien’s many death scenes (arguably the second most brutal is that of Science Officer Ash, but as he’s revealed to be a liquid-filled android instead of a human, it’s not really “death” and it’s not at the hand of the alien).
But it’s important to mark Kane as the first to encounter the species because he’s then the one to, essentially, get raped. Kane is an explorer, then, a kind of curious visionary who seeks more knowledge than is advisable to have. Like his (differently spelled) Biblical namesake, he is among the first humans. But the Biblical Cain, having been born after his parents’ expulsion from Eden for the acquisition of verboten knowledge, also commits the first murder. Various mythologies have sprung up about Cain over the centuries, from his literary use as the first vampire to the source of boogeyman folklore. Officer Kane doesn’t appear to have been a bad guy before his attack, but if he’s to be taken as a symbol more than a flesh-and-blood character, we have him being raped, impregnated, and murdered—perhaps as symbolic retaliation for both Adam and Eve’s over-curious nature as well as Cain’s murder of his own brother.
Because it isn’t just rape. It’s rape in the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge that man (or human) is better off not having. It is Officer Ripley (Weaver) who first advises the returning crew from the planet’s surface to stay in quarantine. If the film is about men’s sexual anxiety, it’s important that the only correct directives continue to come from the female characters, particularly Ripley. Though she is overridden by Ash (male), Ash is also inhuman, so the problem isn’t merely men-versus-women but women-versus-inhuman. The only other female character (Lambert, played by Veronica Cartwright) is the only other human character to live nearly as long as Ripley. The only other survivor of the carnage is the ship’s cat, Jones, and though Jones’ sex is not revealed, cats are often taken as feminine symbols due to their temperament and physiological traits.
Ripley avoids being consumed by the alien due to her sheer determination and intelligence. When female characters in the film pursue knowledge, they are rewarded by getting to live longer or ultimately triumphing. When male characters pursue knowledge (Kane, Dallas, Brett, and Parker), each one of them is systematically killed by the creature. Lambert’s death only comes becomes she was following Parker’s orders, and Dallas’ death comes when he fails to heed Lambert’s warnings to him about the creature’s location.
What makes the alien ultimately so terrifying, however, is its ability to deal death in multiple ways. Its embryo killed through rape and impregnation. Its infant form killed through a sort of “childbirth,” and its adult form killed presumably through hunting and consumption of its prey, yet each victim is found (or not found) in a slightly different state. This unpredictability makes it particularly difficult for the humans to locate and kill, and yet again it’s Ripley’s role as a woman masterful in human-based science and technology usage who is ultimately able to outwit and destroy it. The film’s argument here could be that women are the ones who typically must be more mindful of danger than men, due to the threat of violence from more sectors than merely the inhuman. This vigilance, when inherent in someone with Ripley’s intelligence, makes her the most able to adapt to the creature’s unpredictability without (much) panic.
Dietle, Dan. “Alien: A Film Franchise Based Entirely on Rape.” Cracked. 02 Jan 2011: n. page. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.
Scott, Ridley, dir. Alien. 20th Century Fox, 1979. DVD.