In the pipe, five by five

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 2009)

"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?" – Pvt Hudson
The first "Alien" movie was essentially about a giant alien penis trying to impregnate a woman. Here, MOTHER (a spaceship's maternal computer) and ASH (the paternal cyborg) lovingly conspire to introduce a mysterious alien to the Nostromo, a commercial space-rig. The duo's plan is to have the alien impregnate the Nostromo's passengers, at which point the creature's seed can be safely transported back to earth, where it will be researched and developed into a biological weapon. The film ends with crew-mate Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) vulnerable and in her panties, having survived intergalactic rape and a Playboy magazine down the throat.
James Cameron's sequel, "ALIENS", likewise has "feminist" pretensions. Ripley is awakened from her suspended animation (the film is framed as a nightmarish dream), only to be blackmailed by corporate types (her future's ruling patriarchy) and coerced into returning to LV426, the planet where she first encountered the aliens. Once she arrives on planet, Ripley has to do three things: rescue and protect Newt (her surrogate daughter), fend off impregnation and destroy the Feminine Other (Alien Queen).
At first glance the film looks like a testosterone filled male action movie, but look closer and its clunky feminism is all over the place. All the males are either emasculated or ineffectual. Apone, the tough-as-nails Marine Captain, is wiped out in the first battle. Gorman, the Lieutenant, is useless and spends most of the movie unconscious. Hudson, despite his hilarious macho-ramblings, quickly reveals himself to be a giant cry-baby and Paul Reiser, the corporate weasel, is less representative of Hegemonic Masculinity than he is a snivelling coward. Even Bishop, the male cyborg, gets his crotch torn off. The most masculine marine is Vasquez, a tough Mexican woman who has bigger guns than any other marine. The only male character given sympathy is Hicks (Michael Biehn), but even he ends up taking orders from Ripley.
While the first film portrayed Ripley as a damsel in distress, Cameron portrays her as a tough warrior, albeit maternal enough to care for her surrogate child. She kicks butt, but smiles romantically when Hicks gives her a bracelet. It's your classic Warrior/Goddess dichotomy.
But feminism through a male's eyes isn't feminism at all. That Ripley has to battle at all means that conflict exists where none should. Though Cameron no doubt sees his finale as a giant intergalactic cat fight, two women facing off to defend their offspring in a man-less world, the Alien Mother represents a very masculine feminism; one based solely on reproduction and violent protection of its young.
H R Geiger, the designer of the original alien, has described his art as being about the "fear of messy sexuality". No surprise then that the "Alien franchise" is awash with tiny men walking down vaginal tunnels, periodically attacked by face huggers (flying uteruses) and phallic aliens. But what we have with the Alien Queen is a fear of the Feminine. Fear and awe of the vagina and repulsion toward reproduction.
In the film's final battle, Ripley is forced to take a stand against that in which, for most women, lay their power: procreation. Her main goal is to prevent impregnation, for her and for Newt. In this regard, she must fight against the essential state of the female, motherhood. And so once again, Ripley is asked to turn away from the feminine, to deny another aspect of herself that both she and the Alien Mother share. The hidden ideology of the film, the rejection of the feminine, is apparent once again.
The irony of the final battle is that for Ripley to conquer the Feminine she must master technology (guns, elevators, power loaders etc). Both films are guilty of perpetuating the notion of technology being chiefly male in origin (phallic weaponry and spacecraft) whereas biological processes are the domain of the female. Watch how the marines snicker when Ripley reveals her adeptness with a power loader, or when Hudson mocks Vasquez for carrying a gun. Women apparently are not supposed to be able to operate heavy machinery. Even hundreds of years into the future, technology is still the realm of the male. "Woman-as-tool-user" is still considered anomalous.
This dichotomy goes all the way back to Descartes' notion of objectivity in which men, with so-called "rational" minds, in order to discuss the natural world, were bound to think of themselves as "outside" the realm of the physical. This placed rational thought in the same realm as the masculine and the irrational with the feminine.
The film's attitude toward the Alien Mother shows how pervasive the rational male/irrational female dichotomy has been since the Scientific Revolution. The Alien Mother can be thought of as nature "unhinged" and out of control, akin to how Francis Bacon depicted nature and the natural world in his writings. Bacon believed that, outside of a strong masculinizing influence, Nature tends toward Chaos and the creation of violent monstrosities. The Alien Mother embodies this feminized "state" of nature, a "state" which the new, macho-Ripley must herself renounce.
So while, with its Vietnam overtones, "Aliens" is unconsciously part of the "war-as-destruction-of-the-feminine" trend of the 80s (Casualties of War, Heaven and Earth etc), portraying the Feminine as the debased victim of incompetent male oafs, it also has a more dubious underside. Indeed, Bacon's outlook, along with Descartes', became both a mainstay in the development of scientific thought in the 17th Century and in the establishment of a biological rationale for gender bias and sexism that continues to this day.
8.9/10 – Influenced by Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" (and a shameless rip off of "Them!", of which it even borrows its entire climax), "Aliens" is the perfect action film for a certain demographic. With its brilliant use of solid effects, rear screen projection and an unforgettable final duel, the film wows us with its relentless hardware and technique.