

Smart Things Students Said About Alien

Thomas Richards
What the hell was up with the cat anyway? I mean, I can see that Ripley wants to become the nurturing mothering figure after being disappointed by her surrogate mother (the computer) but everyone was so damn concerned about teh cat.
As we have seen in Metropolis, Things to Come and just about any other sci fi film in the class, Ripley stands diametrically opposed thethe traditional vision of women in sci fi. .. . Taking this film as a logical next step from Stepford Wives, Ripley becomes empowered by her ability to defeat the alien. The other female motif that runs throughout this film is the computer's designation(mother) and the hive-like ship in which the crew are hunted and killed. Even though we later get the Queen in the other Alien films, the femalemotif is strong in this film as it relates to the woman as bothindividualist and self-sufficient. I guess since Ripley waas teh firsttrue female action hero, Ridley scott created a subgenre of female action heroes that was later to include teh Terminator series, Tank Girl, and others.
The other major point I want to make is that this is the first film I recollect where the genesis of the alien from human-like to organic, horrifying cretaure became fixed into the Sci Fi and horro genre. I think this film shows how the space taht we seem so destined to explore contains organic lifeforms that are nowhere near our owh physical structure. If we look at Day the Earth Stood Still and other films about aliens, we alwaysget a picture of aliens resembling us in many ways, but Alien transformed the appearance of the alien to represent a horrific shape of terror. Just look at Independence Day and the aliens in that film as resembling the creature in alien, or Enemy Mine which also uses the critter as alien life
form. I guess what I'm trying to say is that aliens' appearances changed after this film as a result of Scott.
Daniel Presnell
"Nostromo, first published in 1904, is arguably Conrad's greatest and most complex novel. It tells the story of a Central American state whose silver mine serves both Literally and metaphorically as the source of the country's value. The novel was written at the time of the development of the Panama Canal." I found this info on the Internet, I thought it might shed some light on Alien and the theme of the movie and the idea behind the ship name.
The crew dichotomy is much like the war movies from the 40's and 50's. This dichotomy is expressed by characters who have too much courage--Parker--, are afraid--Lambert--, leader as martyr--Dallas--, and the main hero--Ripley--, and the skeptic or enemy-Ash. One could also apply these stereotypes to that of characters in horror movies, where people who are too brave, die, people who are too scared, die, only the character with modesty and intelligence will survive.
The second thing I want to discuss is the idea of sexuality. The alien ship that they first encounter, is not only a ship but also some sort of organic alien. This may seem strange and graphic but after all H.R. Giger did design the set, the ship, when first seen, looks to be in the shape of an oval, thus symbolizing the female. Once inside the ship, Cain encounters the pods deep within the ship. I know that the idea of the pod is at its root, feminine, but if we look at this space where the pods are kept, we can also view this area as a sort of testis. The alien in its initial embodiment is in the shape of a sperm, complete with head and tail. The alien enters Cain, grows, and exists through the stomach in a twisted c-section fashion. This most clearly reflects the workings of the human reproductive system. One of the main fears of this film, is that of penetration. The Alien is most obviously a phallic symbol. He kills by opening his mouth and "tongue-ing" his victim, penetrating him or her and leaving them for dead.
The most interesting death scene is that of Lambert, where the alien slides his tail up Lambert's leg moving toward her torso. This is the most suggestive scene in the movie, the alien, standing fully erect, doesn't just kill her but also seeks to satisfy some sort of sexual desire. WhenRipley hears the screams, she runs down, and when she is standing in the corridor, sounds of the Alien grunting in a sexual manner, and of Lambert's screams are present. It's only a guess, but I believe that the alien attempts or does have sex with Lambert, because it would complete his maturing process. The Alien is growing up; progressing through the infant stages (Cain's chest-eyes closed) to the large full-bodied pubescent Alien in this scene.
The last scene, which seems to be sexual, is the last section of the movie where the alien is on board the escape ship. The alien appears to be sleeping when Ripley first encounters it. His hand falls down, his mouth opens and out comes the alien tongue which seems to kiss
the air, reminiscent of the tongue as it kills Parker and Ray(?). I believe the alien is having some sort of sexual dream. This scene comes immediately after the alien kills Lambert. The entire confrontation of Ripley and the Alien is sexual, she is at first half-naked, and once she begins to shoot the alien, she begins to grunt in a sexual manner. It is also ironic that
Ripley kills the alien by penetration (the spear), in a similar killing fashion to that of the alien.
The other weird sexual scene is the battle between Ripley and Ash. The room where the battle takes place, the walls are covered with porno-mag centerfolds. Ash attempts to strangle Ripley by inserting a rolled up porno-mag into her mouth. Draw your own conclusion!
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" adopts a similar style of hiding the phallic shape killer (raincoat and rain hat). The movies are also similar in the cast/crew dichotomy and the final scenes where the hero is shocked to find the killer hidden in their safe surroundings.
Mike Piekutowski
There is so much going on in Alien that I hardly know where to begin. I think I've figured out what the cat means though. It involves a little psychoanalysis, which I'm not big on, but I think this film was made with Freud's ideas in mind. I don't think I'm reading in stuff that's not really there.
To understand the cat, you have to look at it as a symbol of one of the two struggling sides in Ripley. The first is her masculine side that tries to ensure her success in a masculine centered society, and this is represented by the alien (thus the huge phallus). I'll explore this more fully in my research project, but now back to the cat. The cat comes to represent her feminine side (come on guys, it's a "pussy" cat), a side which she tries to repress but keeps reemerging throughout the narrative of the film. Look at the scene in which Ripley is seeking the alien, her macho attitude, with the motion detector (another phallus which she holds in her crotch), but her femininty jumps out when the cat emerges. This is one of the scenes in which Ripley displays raw and irrational emotion. It takes one of the ship's repairmen to point out that it is just a harmless cat, hardly threatening in their masculine dominated ship. Other than the scene in which Bret is mauled, the cat does not reemerge until near the end of the film. Correspondingly, Ripley displays no more raw emotion without the cat, with possibly the exception of when Ash shoves the magazine (another phallus!) down her throat. The cat reemerges in Ripley's first physical encounter with the maturing alien, and thus we have the final showdown in which she must recognize that she cannot rely merely on her masculine instincts, but that she must learn to balence her attributes. This goes back to the class discussion about how Ripley is the only one who knows which rules to follow and which rules to break in the corporate structure in order to survive. She cannot rely simply on the corporations rules (the macho code), nor on simply raw emotion (the blundering horror film female). She must meld the two in order survive. Incidentally, the alien does not kill the cat in its face to face encounter, either symbolizing how it perceives the feminine side as being too weak too bother with, or how it is necessary to its own existence. I think the power of the feminine side would have been more highly dramaticized if the scene in which the cat warns Ripley had been left in the film. Ripley ends up using both emotion and a phallus (the gun) in order to expel the male dominance that has ruled her life, and the film ends with her stroking the cat in her lap at the end, displaying her repressed feminine side's reemergence.
While I am on psychoanalysis, I want to look at one other image that is relevant to my discussion, and that is the construction of the ship. It has some huge towers on top of the ship (the phalluses), and quite a few domes on the bottom of the ship (breasts). The phalluses are the dominate feature, much as Ripley's dominant mode of thought is her masculine side. The breasts are on the bottom, visually representing their repression beneath the phallus. It should also be noted that there is a clear line between the two structures, and also that the phalluses are on top (considering there is no "up" in space). This image becomes very important in the scene in which the ship is destroyed. The explosion occurs as a horizontal line between the two predominant structures, destroying that line between what is masculine and what is feminine. This symbolizes Ripley's transition from the masculine repressing the feminine into the careful coexistence of the two. Only after this line has been destroyed can Ripley expel the dominating creature into space (a vagina, but I won't go into that).
Well, that's all the psychoanalysis I can handle for one morning. That's Ripley, believe it or not...
Dale L. Theiling
One of the interesting points of this movie is the "Company". Now, we all know that part of this movie is meant to show how big business gargantuan, all-powerful corporations are bad, but it really shows it as downright evil and dangerous. I think the best way to realize this is by realizing that this ship and its crew were sent out on a dummy mining operation for the sole purpose of being rerouted and awakened to discover this alien. The Company must have known something about it before the ship left...they put Ash on the crew. So it wasn't like the Company just happened upon an opportunity and sent the Nostromo to do the dirty work (and die), which is bad enough; it actually premeditated this plan and set up the entire crew years in advance, knowing they would probably die. Alien shows one of the most extreme cases of the capitalist system gone wrong.
I'd also like to mention the ships (I'm using Alien as one of my movies to write about just this subject). There are several points that can be made. First, most of us have heard that Alien is a movie about "truckers in space", and indeed they are. The living quarters are pretty nice and clean (if cluttered), but the workings of the ship are ugly, dark, run down. wet, and falling apart. The characters are very rough, their clothes are dirty and shoddy (no real uniforms), and they are basically all manual laborers. This is a far cry from the clean ships of Star Trek and other Sci-Fi films which rely somewhat on the ships. Second is the alien ship, which was just amazing. There are some wonderful contrasts between the two ships. In the Nostromo, there are wires and tubes and whatnot that form patterns and symmetry, but their makeup is still discernable from the organic forms of the crew. In the Alien ship, walls were smooth and shiny and had a more lifelike look to them. What I'm saying is the Alien ship looks more alive than Nostromo, and the Aliens themselves look more mechanical than the humans. This point comes to its climax with the scene that shows that the pilot and the ship are merged together, making the animal/machine connection all too clear. Also, I'd just like to mention the fact that both ships were, in places, wet. We discussed the importance of this in regard to the hero's quest, and I think it applies...the dangerous areas are the wet ones. What I found interesting was that the Nostromo was only wet in places, and only by accident (broken pipes, water condensing on cold parts of the ship) but the Alien ship was wet everywhere, and it seemed to be that way out on necessity...it had to be wet in order to function. Another animal/machine connection, and a way to creep people out.
Robert Helms
I can't take it anymore, I hate talking like this. . The reason that I do not like Freud/ postmodernism is that it is too conducive to stretching the point. You can make a terrible argument, but as long as you fill it with words like phallus and interpret everything sexually, no one will shoot it down.
Jeffrey McQuillan
With dark corridors, people running and screaming, a creature killing folks, doing stupid stuff like going after cats when something is out to kill you, eerie music, silence just before surprise, a marketing line that reads, "In space, no one can hear you scream.", distorted camera angles, a sense of claustrophobia, and creatures popping out of peoples bodies this
truly is a sci-fi film--NOT!!! ALIEN is so much a horror film that I don't even see this as a cross between horror and sci-fi. ALIEN is nothing more than a haunted house in space. Just because the film is set in outer space and has spaceships doesn't make it sci-fi. It's just a horror film using some of the elements of sci-fi. The fact that Ripley survives is not so surprising if viewed within the horror genre. Women are often the protagonist and survivors of these films. Just look at HALLOWEEN and SCREAM. The whole thing about sexuality in this film is classic horror. I have yet to find a person that could make a strong argument that this film is a cross genre film, let alone a sci-fi film. I welcome anyone to give reasons why this is sci-fi.
In terms of phallic symbols, while I believe that the alien has multiple meanings in the film, the idea that it is a penis comes across the strongest. Not only is the head (no pun intended) shaped like a penis, but it's "thrusting" mouth is very much like a penis. When applied to the way the alien uses it's mouth punch holes into people, the phrase of being
"f***ed to death" becomes a very literal concept. So, I see the alien as having a penis within a penis.
There are many things in the article that caught my attention that deserve to be mentioned. First, there is an error. It says that Ripley is the second officer of the Nostromo, but she is the third. Remember what she says to Ash. She tells him that she is in command when Dallas and the John urt character are off the ship. I liked the part about Ripley being compared to "the Divine Mother" who wants to preserve life. She is "opposed to the sterility of the merely technological." If Ripley represents this preservation of life, I think the men represent the sterile technology. I think it fits into the article we read for STEPFORD WIVES about men using
technology to create . Man's creation through technology often is destructive, as Ash and Mother would confirm. This is about the only thing that is truly sci-fi"ish" about the film, in my mind, but still not enough to make it not horror.
In relating to other films, ALIEN does resemble THE THING in some ways. The planet they land on is much like the Arctic land where the scientists are located in THE THING. It is described as "deep cold." One could say that the ship in ALIEN is the base in THE THING. Both are trapped within these structures because the outside can't support human life. Space (outer) is another kind of frozen tundra. I think there is a similarity between Ash and the head scientist from THE THING. Not only are they both science officers, but their relationship to the creatures in both films is the same. They both admire the aliens for theie pureness and advanced evolutionary complexity.
Dan Burns
THE CAT SCENE: We went on and on about this...but I think the device of having Ripley go back for the damn cat is really a standard of the Hollywood suspense/horror film and the repeated lengthening of these sorts of moments in the film (irrelevant but for the purpose of instilling fear and tension in viewer and characters) undermines the thematic complexities of the film. It's interesting the way the tension between viewing the film as art and entertainment creates such a fascinating line between the two. The brainy perspective one can view the film with comes off as sort of bloodless (why else would we accuse her of being a big softy for going back for the cat) and mean-spirited but dammit...why the hell did she go back for that cat? It totally weakens the newly jaded nature of her character. And why does the viewer enjoy those masochistic displays of technical skill...(the juxtaposition between Ripley listening to her crewmates being killed and the look on their faces.) It's interesting b/c other directors have made much of these manipulations, directly tying them in with their various themes and symbols. Hitchcock's manipulation of every aspect of his production, especially two quotes attributed to him go hand-in-hand with the fates of his protagonists.
"I like to play the audience like a piano."
"Actors are like cattle."
He wasn't very respectful in many ways...thought himself above the audience and the actors who gave life to his intensely personal visions. In Vertigo, what many consider to be his most personal film--Hitch uses the metaphor of vertigo (an almost orgasmic attraction to and repulsion from the act of falling) to display his cool techniques ("simultaneous zoom--reverse pulls" down various airshafts and stairs to scare the viewer) without losing sight of how they might reflect the concerns of the critical/symbolic nature of the story. Kubrick and Peckinpah are fairly consistent in this way too (maybe its an auteur thing) as they manipulate the audience for entertainment, while still maintaining a strong connection to the themes. I didn't find this very often in Alien...perhaps what makes it so interesting and different (i'm not comfortable calling it a masterpiece...though it prob'ly is one). Scott keeps a clearly defined border between the thinking story and the visceral story...and it creates a real departure in this viewers mind from previous directors.. . . I'm undecided as to whether it's a strength or a weakness. Was it purposeful to separate the two with little or no synthesis? Was this a sign of the incoming superficiality of 80s cinema? We'll see...
James Jackson
employees and you get to see yet another interpretation of what the future will be like. But lets be honest, the best part of this movie is the horror. Everybody likes to watch some unknown being stalk and destroy an entire party of people, and then get killed by the sole survivor who acts like it was just another day in the life of a space explorer. Without the horror aspects, this movie would have been a total sleeper and there would never have been 3 sequels made.