OVERVIEW:
Alien, a film by Ridley Scott, is quite possibly one of the most iconic sci-fi horror films ever portrayed. It follows the crew of Nostromo, a large commercial starship floating around in deep space. The members aboard the ship are awakened from cryo-sleep in order to answer a rogue distress call from a nearby alien vessel. This is where things begin to go wrong for the unsuspecting crew. Upon being awakened, the crew hears continuously receives the distress calls, and upon reaching the alien ship, finds a nest of eggs inside the vessel. Upon sending one of the crew members, Kane, into the ship's holding where the eggs are found, an organism attaches itself to his face, rendering him comatose. When brought back to the ship it is found that the parasite is supplying Kane with oxygen and removing it would cause his immediate death. Kane is left in quarantine. Later the creature is found dead, and Kane is left alive. All appears well until a creature bursts from Kane's chest having been layed inside of him by the first creature. He dies, and the horror continues for the crew.
ANALYSIS MICRO:
Pictured above are drawings of the alien in the film as created by artist H.R Giger. When Scott first pursued a designer for his creature, he had in mind a certain aesthetic that came with Giger's work. For his work on Alien, Giger has won multiple awards including "Best Achievement for Visual Effects", and his mix of surreal, with organic and mechanical forms helps greatly contribute to a psychoanalytical reading of Alien. When looking at the prototypes for Alien, sexual imagery is clearly portrayed in the creature itself. The shapes are, well, penile, including the head and tongue extension, and it's organic figure is not something of beauty, but is fairly hypersexualized in the positions in the above images. The erotic view on the Alien, which combines natural with the unnatural, is only spurred with the impregnation of Kane with it's offspring. However, Giger did not only work on the adult alien pictured above, he designed the rogue ship which was filled with the eggs, Kane's original face-hugging alien, and the serpent like chest bursting alien offspring as shown in the top video. From infancy and birth from Kane's chest to the fully grown adult creature, the erotic aesthetics of the aliens and Giger's art work hyper sexualizes the alien and adds a sense of organic to the mechanical and parasitic alien that causes the crew so much grief.
ANALYSIS MACRO:
The alien is not the only part of the film that lends itself to psychoanalysis. The rogue ship itself is packed with biological looking forms, that lend themselves to the reproductive cycle . When Kane first finds the eggs, he enters into a ship which seemingly resembles a womb-like state (a tight, dark room with the eggs attached to the floor) which is opposed to the figure of the adult alien who also appears more of a male. The ship is layed out seemingly as a uterus, where the eggs are incubating. It's dark, compact and filled with various caverns and tunnels, or tubes, that house the eggs. Much like fallopian tubes that carry eggs to the uterus to grow. The egg chamber, once Kane finds it, also does something fairly curious when touched. The covering of the eggs react to touch, it bursts, revealing the eggs inside violently. When Kane does this, it's like he has fertilized the eggs, entering the womb like room to them. His example, finding the room, touching the veil, the veil retracting to reveal the eggs, he is the sperm to the situation. He's done something he cannot undo, and has set into motion the course of events to follow where he himself becomes impregnated. Here we have another insertion of a Freudian theory, the Oedipus Complex, stemming from the Greek tragedy. When later in the film, the alien, in it's slithering serpent form bursts forth from Kane's chest, we have the idea that the son murders the father, one half of Oedipus Rex, when later the son goes on to marry the mother, which never really happens in the movie. Freud's theory of a child having an attraction to a parent of the opposite sex and thusly having a poor or treacherous relationship with the other parent is applied. Kane dies at the hand of "his son", the infant alien in the chest burster scene. Aha, child sabotage, kid murders his father.
Now, there's another type of relationship that deals with Ripley, the main female character of the Alien series, and MU-TH-UR 6000 (Mother), the ship's computer motherboard that acts as a guiding factor to the crew. Ripley disagrees with the computer when it puts capturing the hostile alien invader above the lives of the crew members on board the ship. Female to female relationship in which the computer is named Mother, it seems we have another tumultuous offspring to same gender parent dealing here. It only becomes more clear when another crew member, Ash, who is employed to care for Kane in his comatose state appears to be on opposite ends of the spectrum with Ripley and agrees with Mother. He follows out the initial request to capture the alien, and if need be at cost to the crew member's lives. Ash is a male, a son, and has a positive relationship with mother relating back to Oedipus Complex again. When he is discovered to be nothing but a machine himself, he really becomes a son figure to the Motherboard, machine to machine.
All this is done to imply rape of some sort. From the rogue message like that of a 911 dispatcher, to Kane forcibly entering the womb-like chamber of the rogue ship and inciting fertilization where he was not welcome, to the parasitic creature intubating him and starving him of oxygen for its own gain, to the violent birth of the infant alien from Kane's chest, to Ridley running throughout the film from the masculine phallic adult alien, rape is portrayed in an unnatural, powerful, otherworldly and terrifying way from both the male and female perspective
Exchange between Mother and Ripley:
Exchange between Mother and Ripley:
[Ripley has tried in vain to disengage the Nostromo's self-destruct]
Ripley: Mother! I've turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!
Mother: The ship will automatically destruct in "T" minus five minutes.
Ripley: You... BITCH!
Between Mother, Ash, and Ripley:
Ripley: Ash. Any suggestions from you or Mother?
Ash: No, we're still collating.
Ripley: [laughing in disbelief] You're what? You're still collating? I find that hard to believe.
Ash: What would you like me to do?
Ripley: Just what you've been doing, Ash, nothing.
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