However, there's simply no getting out of talking about the sequel in 1986 and there's another movie related to this one I'd kind of like to talk about a bit once we reach the 1990s, so to LV-426 we go.
Like Star Wars before it, Alien is a movie about which I have extremely little to add to the discourse that's already out in the wild, and this time I don't have an especially meaningful personal story to relate to make up for my lack of erudition. Its setpieces are, of course, iconic, and all of its most memorable themes and scenes have been analysed and re-analysed countless times over. I'm reasonably confidant anyone reading this knows what this movie is and what it does, so there's not a ton of new material to build an essay out of here. But there is some. There are three primary things I'd like to discuss about Alien and its impact: The first is that, as horror movie expert James Rolfe points out, Alien is fundamentally a slasher movie set in outer space. More specifically, it's a throwback to the old haunted house movies that characterized the early 1930s, where a group of ill-prepared travellers show up somewhere they're not supposed to, come into contact with some kind of supernatural horror and get picked off one by one.
Alien's major innovation in this regard is that the slasher villain is an extraterrestrial and the haunted house is a crashed spaceship on a foreboding planet on the edge of outer space in the far future. But while the trappings are horror, the plot is very heavily indebted to B-movie science fiction of the 1950s, namely It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which Alien is, plot-wise, essentially the exact same movie as. This is both completely intentional and completely forgivable: Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, who we'll be talking a great deal about in this entry, flat out said “I didn't steal from anyone. I stole from everyone.” in regards to his script for Alien. Forgivable firstly because that's so charmingly glib, but also because Alien is a case study in how actually unimportant plot is to crafting a successful and influential work of fiction. Alien is of course legendary for the way it conveys narrative through atmosphere and setting, and director Ridley Scott and designer H.R. Giger get a lot of credit in this regard, as well they should: Scott's direction gives the film a dark, claustrophobic feeling and Giger's designs for the ships, the landscape and the alien itself are famously nightmarish and twisted.
There's also a significant class aspect to the setting that's very much worth commenting on: The Nostromo is explicitly a floating refinery and ore processing unit, and its crew are miners and engineers in the employ of the massive Weyland-Yutani corporation. Alien isn't quite the first time such overtly working-class space travellers were depicted, but it is the first time they're given such explicit focus in a massively populist work of blockbuster Soda Pop Art, especially when they're so clearly meant to be the sympathetic heroes: Weyland-Yutani was ready to sacrifice the entire crew to bring back one of the aliens so they could use it as a doomsday weapon, and sent the android Ash in disguise as a science officer to ensure the plan went off without a hitch.
Treating its employees as expendable worker units, not to mention attempting to weaponize something as horrific as the alien, marks Weyland-Yutani as obviously evil, but the fact they didn't install any oversight apart from one android supervisor to oversee such a delicate operation marks them as pretty incompetent too. This means that, among everything else it does, Alien also manages to get a fairly comprehensive and damning critique of the corporatist mentality on actual movie screens in 1979, the dawn of the greed-and-misanthropy fueled Neoconservative revolution, which is a truly remarkable achievement that ought to be considered among the rest of the film's substantial legacy.
Alien is also known for its feminist motifs and examination of gender roles. Most people like to point to Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, the first motion picture action heroine, as the prime example of this, but she's actually a feint (in fact, she was supposed to be a man until a last-minute rewrite). Alien is, in fact, a sexual horror movie, and this informs everything it does in regard to gender. The idea is not as straightforwardly bizarre as it might seem: There is a shared malaise and uneasiness in regard to sexuality, a genuine fear of sex, in Western culture that Alien deliberately plays off of: As I mentioned in the context of “Mudd's Women”, because of the network of taboos associated with sexuality, sexual desire and nudity in Western societies, there's an accompanying sense of guilt and confusion that winds up stunting emotional growth and leads to many of the problems with attitudes toward sexuality we see today. And, perhaps fittingly, this is where the film's feminist themes come through as well. Not strictly from Ripley herself, though she's a part of it: No, the real feminism in Alien comes from a far more disturbing place: Its lurking, predatory sexual imagery.
Everyone comments on H.R. Giger's famous sexually-charged designs, such as the extremely phallic alien head, mouth and tail, Space Jockey seat and starship, as well as the facehugger, which resembles a cross between a penis and a vagina. Then there is, of course, “Mother” and the climactic chase through a darkened tunnel where a woman in torn clothing is being chased by a drooling, mindlessly violent penis monster. It actually goes even deeper than that, however: The interior of the Space Jockey ship has very vaginal-shaped openings and tunnels, and Scott shoots the scene where the crew inspects the cargo of alien eggs a very specific way. Crucially, however, Alien doesn't make its monster a stand-in for straightforward sexual desire, either to explore Western sexual fear or as an act of subversive rebellion (that's the next H.R. Giger sci-fi horror movie): Rather, it takes a specific cultural narrative about and attitude toward sexuality and depicts that as horrifying and monstrous.
And this is not Ridley Scott's doing. This is the work of Dan O'Bannon (with help from Giger), and this was in truth the entire impetus for Alien in the first place. And O'Bannon is not shy about this in the slightest-In a retrospective interview about the entire franchise, O'Bannon describes his goals for the original Alien like this:
"One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex...I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And 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.'"
Much has been made about the underlying rape motifs in Alien and the overtures it makes to rape culture. And this is all perfectly valid: Alien is *absolutely* about rape culture. But Alien doesn't *subscribe* to rape culture, not in the slightest: Rather, it takes the rape culture of men and throws it back in their faces. It forcibly subjects men to the fear, shame and depersonalization they put women through on a daily basis. There's the famous part with Kane and the facehugger, but what's not picked up on as often is that this was totally telegraphed. That scene I mentioned above, where the crew goes to inspect the alien eggs for the first time? Kane is the character in that scene too. But the other side of that scene we're supposed to notice is that Kane was implicitly “raping” the Space Jockey ship. Kane makes his way through the vaginal doorways to the ship's “womb”, which is full of alien eggs, where he finds the one that promptly hatches. Kane is, in fact, a sperm cell, and his very presence is what fertilizes the alien egg and causes his undoing, and, by extension, that of the entire crew.
(I'm not the only one who's noticed this, by the way: Cracked even did a whole article on it, for which I am quite grateful.)
This is where Alien's haunted house trappings come back into play: Just as the hapless travellers are not supposed to be in the haunted house, the Weyland-Yutani corporation (and they are the ultimate villains here, not the crew they sent on this doomed mission: Blaming them would be akin to blaming spermatocites-Spermatocites too frightened to understand what's going on) is not supposed to be on LV-426. Its presence and overtures are flatly not welcome, and its persistence is directly responsible for unleashing the horror of the alien. Weyland-Yutani, the idealized masculine corporate body of late capitalism taken to the extreme, is a rapist in more than one sense: Its treatment of its workers and plans for the alien are evil, so when it all backfires thanks to its incompetence it's at once grotesque and cathartic to see its attempts at greed and domination brutally undone. But if Alien is an anti-corporatist screed, it's still primarily an incidental one, and it's important to remember the movie's real target is institutionalized rape culture in all its forms. And that means that anyone who has partaken in rape culture is equally as guilty and frightening as Weyland-Yutani and the extraterrestrial monster who stalks helpless victims through corridors.
This is where the film's true strength becomes clear: Its reappropriation of the rape culture narrative. Did you ever notice how, in spite of being unbelievably phallic, the alien must by definition be female (or at least partly female), because it lays eggs? This is the end result of Alien's systemic inversion of the rape culture narrative, and how O'Bannon was able to tap into every man's subconscious fear-A monster with the single-minded violent determination of a male rapist, but who's actually female. A female entity capable of dehumanizing and subjugating men with the same effortless power men have traditionally asserted over women. Alien, and its titular monster, is the collective nightmares and evil emotions of patriarchy given form and will and unleashed to terrorize the minds and bodies of the masculine oppressors to show them the true depths of their monstrousness...and to remind us how destructive such attitudes ultimately are.
It is impossible to overstate how important this is. And, despite Alien not actually being fully sci-fi, this has tremendous repercussions for any sci-fi work made in its wake. Science fiction as a genre, unique even among a lot of other kinds of fiction, is appallingly glib and capricious about rape. Any number of the B-movies Alien itself lifts from freely and happily engaged with it, another thing that makes referencing them such a genius movie on O'Bannon's part. Star Trek itself has been guilty of some shockingly inexcusable acts of rape culture already. Hell, we just came off of “The Child”, which, in spite of the strives it makes with its conception of Deltan sexuality, is still mired down in rape culture. And, in a post-Alien world, this is simply no longer acceptable. Well, I mean it never *was*, but now a cultural shift has occurred where this fact at least should be more widely understood and accepted. There's a target on the back of anyone who might dare to engage in rape apologia from now on.
It's long past time for our culture and cultural artefacts to grow the fuck up.
