“Mommy, I’m Scared.”
Sex, Gender, and the Family Unit in Alien (1979)
*lightly editorialized for Medium; essay originally written 5/12/19
Although its antagonist is inhuman, Alien (1979) is very much about humanity. Consider even the opening sequence, wherein nondescript white bars slowly transform into the letters of the title. What seems at first a stylistic choice actually indicates this as a film determined to mess with our notions of familiarity. Specifically, director Ridley Scott takes two familiar social concepts—motherhood and gender—and twists them throughout the film to yield different results. After reviewing the film, I concluded Scott’s ability to make motherhood feel unsafe makes the horror work; and I believe that Ripley’s pseudo-genderlessness gives her an advantage which the narrative rewards by keeping her alive and allowing her to defeat the Alien.
A Family Affair
From the very beginning, the film’s mise-en-scène is gendered. The ship’s AI guide is called “Mother,” after all; its very underbelly covered with a dozen bulbous metal domes that resemble wombs, or even breasts, and its corridors, which seem to grow more narrow, more dark, and more wet over the course of the film, could be compared to birthing canals — cold and metal though they are. And it’s more than fair to say that our main character emerges on the other side of this perverse birthing process as a new person. But what kind of person is that?
Of the Nostromo’s seven crew members, four are men: Dallas, Kane, Parker, and Brett. (I count Ash somewhat separately, for reasons I’ll discuss momentarily.) The other two are female: Lambert, the ship’s navigator, and our protagonist Ellen Ripley, the warrant officer. But things become more layered once you consider that she was a he at first. Director Ridley Scott’s decision to change Ripley into a woman after early drafts of the script was a landmark for an era dominated by musclebound action superstars, though within the world of the movie, it’s actually surprisingly understated. In fact, outside of an emotional Lambert shouting “You bitch!!!” and slapping Ripley at one point, it is almost never made explicit that her womanhood has anything to do with how the crew interact with her, or how the film looks at her. Lambert herself is the subject of the film’s only dirty joke, targeted at her most probably because she is the more easily gendered of the two women. Actress Sigourney Weaver’s six-foot stature places her well-over most of her castmates’ heads, even the men, and her distinctive timbre stands out whenever she speaks. Her physical qualities, although she doesn’t yet know it, make her explicitly qualified to do battle with the invader.
While Ripley’s gender identity remains in flux for the majority of the plot, the other characters are established very clearly and early on, in part by placing them in a would-be family dynamic. For example: Dallas’s position as captain makes him the only person who can enter the AI chamber. When Ash interrupts the crew’s post-hibernation meal to notify him — “Dallas, Mother wants to talk to you.” — he has to rush away to tend to the ship’s needs, much like a doting elder son. The chamber he enters to speak with Mother is a spherical eggshell-colored room bathed in warm tones. He sits in the central chair, ergo Mother’s lap, and literally asks it to tell him “the story.” Brett and Parker fulfill the stereotype of the neglected, adopted children, spending the first act of the film arguing with Dallas over their portion of the shares, which they feel aren’t big enough for the work they do. These two most completely embody the blue-collar everyman archetype that Scott and his team were so interested in capturing. They speak with less sophistication than their coworkers, concerned only with earning their cash.
If there is a favorite son, it has to be Ash. After all, he shares a cybernetic origin with Mother. The entire time, their goals are aligned — retrieve the Alien and bring it back to Earth for examination. “All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.” And with all due respect to Ian Holm, it is difficult to ignore how infantile this film makes him look at times. He is short, stout, and clean shaven. In long shots, especially the scene where he attacks Ripley, his clothes seem to be a bit too small for him, like a child just beginning to outgrow his pajamas. The very first thing we see him consume is milk, and later, when he begins to bleed, a milky substance oozes out of his pores. He is the baby of the bunch, determined to supplant the family unit as established.
Hush Little Baby…
As the Alien’s first victim, Thomas Kane is the bridge between the film’s mutation of motherhood and its gender misdirection. His death is not a response to any particularly masculine action that the character takes, but rather the most immediate way for the Alien to make evident just how alien it is. Later entries to the franchise would label this creature the Xenomorph, literally “strange shape,” and it demonstrates this to us by inserting itself for incubation into a human being of the wrong sex. By the time we reach the chest-burster scene, it is clear to see that Scott wanted to emulate a real-life birthing process. The crew surround and hold him down like doctors pinning a woman in labor. He’s right beneath a lamp that, at once simply the centerpiece to the dining room, now seems scorching and searing bright like the light in an operation room.
Our understanding of what has to happen, that something needs to come out of him to relieve the agony, amplifies the tension until a spray of blood shotguns from his center. It is then we fully realize this passenger has no prerequisite to preserve the parent. His writhing intensifies even more until his ribs explode with a vicious crunch and the newborn emerges. Pale, whining, umbilical, and (very) phallic, the organism dashes into the halls, escaping before the crew can comprehend what they have seen.
While the crew takes time to mourn together after a fruitless search, the Alien is already growing, and at a rate more exponential than anything their Earth-based science can explain. At one point, Ash whispers to himself that the creature is “Kane’s son.” But, since Kane died in childbirth, the Nostromo is raising it now. As Eve tamed, named, and tended all the animals in Eden, so Mother itself must nurture this creature that is not only inhuman, but actively anti-human, and perfectly designed to end us. It picks off the crew members one at a time, but to what end remains unclear. We never see the Alien feast on a corpse, or cocoon it for later. It doesn’t even care about laying eggs of its own. It is purely a hunter, a natural force of chaotic purpose, focused only on honing its prowess.
As the Alien picks Ripley’s colleagues off, we see how ways in which they have marked their gender and their character are turned against them in the end. Dallas goes into the air vents, thinking Mother will protect him, but Mother shields its newfound child, cloaking the Alien in shadow till it has its prey in sight, and he dies. Parker, the most macho man onboard, tries to stand against the Alien as though it is another man, and he dies. Lambert, the navigation officer, dies paralyzed by fear, literally not knowing where to go, and we’re close on the Alien’s tail as it carves a path up between her thighs. Her last line is a scream. In these three killings the Alien also opens its arms wide as if preparing an embrace, turning a nurturing gesture into a death cradle.
During interview for the documentary Alien Evolution, writer Dan O’Bannon said that the movie’s core fear is “interspecies rape…That’s scary because it hits all of our buttons.” Between Scott’s staging and Giger’s iconic design, that terror is achieved. From conception, every act the Alien takes is penetrative. The face hugger plunges an oxygen tube into Kane’s throat, only for its issue to crack his chest outward. Once full grown, the Alien has a smaller, retractable set of jaws within its mouth that punch out like the bird in a macabre coo-coo clock, and its serpentine tail ends with a sickly blade. Though sexless, these features make the Alien a serrated, acidic male force corrupting the very womb which kept it warm, turning the Nostromo’s halls into a maze only it can solve. So how can Ripley possibly combat a being like that? As it turns out, she’s quite the shapeshifter herself.
“Unsex Me Here”
After destroying the Nostromo and killing Mother, Ripley is ready to let her guard down. For the first time in the film, we see her gender herself. She strips out of her sweaty uniform revealing sparse white underwear beneath. The camera doesn’t lick its lips over her, but she is extremely exposed, and there’s no doubt of her femininity. Then she discovers that the Alien has made its way onto her life raft, and what comes next reminds me of a passage from Macbeth, when Lady M calls on dark forces to “unsex me here” so she can do what work she knows needs to be done.
Storytelling conventions dictate that the protagonist is supposed to change for having encountered the antagonist, and it makes sense. What would be the point otherwise? One of the clearest ways to demonstrate this change is having the hero take on a clear trait of the enemy. Ripley learns formlessness.
Calmly, determinedly, and without ever taking her eyes off the enemy, Ripley backs into the closet and slips herself into a thick white space suit. In the world of the movie, this makes logical sense, because any fight against this thing is best fought clothed. And on a macro level, this is a character deciding not just to de-gender herself, but to unsex herself, becoming only what is needed to defeat this threat. It’s as if without a clear way to mark her identity, the Alien loses its primary hunting strategy. She jettisons the creature into space and blasts it with the exhaust fumes of the life raft. Finally, she sits down to breathe, holding onto Jonesy the cat quite literally for dear life.
Alien is a triumph of science-fiction and horror hybridity. It manages to ask all the contemplative questions that have become standard to sci-fi, while also providing what the audience always wants from a horror film; genuine, lasting fear. The now famous tagline of the movie reads that “In space, no one can hear you scream,” and as chilling as that is, perhaps it isn’t even the scariest idea. Perhaps what’s more terrifying is that someone — or something — can hear you.
It just doesn’t care.
