(Death to the Queen)
In Aliens (James Cameron, 1991 ), contrary to Carol Clover’s exposition of the Final Girl, abject fear may be initially gendered feminine, but it is later shared by both sexes as the film progresses. Additionally, whereas the tomboyish Final Girl may be feminized by her fear, Ripley’s fear gives evolves into aggression. Ripley is gendered by her violent behavior, her relationship to the marines, and her feelings for Newt. The alien queen is the monstrous externalization of the nightmares Ripley has carried within from the prequel, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), and as such is also the embodiment of Ripley’s sense of alienation. By defeating the queen, Ripley purges herself of Final Girl-ishness and drives the narrative to fully emerge as a woman.
According to Carol Clover, a common factor in slasher flicks from the 70’s and 80’s is the Final Girl, the character who thwarts the monster and survives. (Clover, 37). The Final Girl is not coded in stereotypically feminine ways. “The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine . . . . Her smartness, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart” (Clover, 40). The Final Girl is not set up to be a sexual spectacle, and her role is that of the heroic survivor of the rampage of the typically male killer. The Final Girl has become a heroine by adopting the mantel of a male hero while preserving certain stereotypical feminine frailties, like screaming and running. In Aliens, these frailties are replaced with Ripley’s maternal caring and defensive aggression.
In the beginning of Aliens, after Ripley has awakened aboard a space station over Earth and has been told by Burke that her hyper-sleep in space had lasted fifty-seven years, she convulses and screams as an alien larva (burster) attempts to erupt from her chest. Although this is only a dream, it portends the nightmares of days to come, and illuminates her own feelings of alienation and isolation. She has been distanced from the world she new fifty-seven years ago both literally and figuratively. Ripley doesn’t recognize the space station, she never reaches Earth, and her daughter is dead. Additionally, a corporate tribunal strips Ripley of her flight status and relegates her to working on docks after discrediting her previous experience with the alien on the Nostromo. Her terror of her nightmares appears to gender her female, but she is now working in a stereotypically male position. In a key scene illustrating Ripley’s sense of alienation, having just shown the spectator one of the spider-like aliens (face-huggers) clamped to the face of Newt’s father, with Newt’s stratospheric screams punctuating the terror of the moment, the film cuts to a close-up of a rising thread of smoke, then pans down to show the cigarette in Ripley’s long, bony fingers, which resemble the articulated limbs of the face-hugger. The camera then moves up Ripley’s arm and settles on her face, in profile. She stares at her hand with dark, inscrutable eyes. The sense conveyed is that she is metamorphosing into an alien herself, losing her humanity, her femaleness, in her isolation.
After rejecting the offer by Burke and Lt. Gorman to accompany them to LV-426, the planet on which the monster in Alien was found, Ripley awakens from another nightmare screaming and sweating. The camera lingers on the upper half of her body, while she sits and massages the place the burster would have emerged. Her hand drifts to the left of this place, emphasizing her breast, highlighting that she is still a female.
On board the Sulaco, the marines’ spaceship traveling to LV-426, Ripley is demonstrably feminized through the eye of the camera as well as through her relationship with the marines. When she explains what the alien in previous encounter did to her crew, and responds quivering in frustration to the marines trivializing the creature as a bug, she is portrayed as having far less machismo than they. Also, when Ripley drives the cargo-loader to move some equipment, when the camera shoots Hicks and Apone agape and then reverse shoots Ripley as she pauses with a load, obviously poised for the feminizing male gaze, she is also feminized by her frailty relative to the cumbersome bulk of the loader. Her femaleness is even developed in comparison with the female marines.
After the lids rise off the sleep-chambers in the Sulaco, Ripley lies with a hand behind her head and writhes sensuously, momentarily, as she stirs awake next to the more rigid bodies of male marines still sleeping. The contrast between her and the butch, female marines is more complex. While Vasquez does pull-ups, the camera zooms in on her admiring her flexing biceps with Ripley dressing in the background, relatively out of shape and less buxom. As Drake does pull-ups next to Vasquez in a tightly framed shot, her femaleness is established despite her muscularity, do to her figure and softness. When Hudson asks her if she had ever been mistaken for a man, and she denies it but then asks whether he had ever been mistaken for one, the film draws attention to the motif of what constitutes masculinity and femininity. Vasquez is certainly more macho than Ripley, but is less masculine looking than Drake; and her relationship with Drake is underplayed in sexual terms. Additionally, Vasquez is feminized in the close-up of her face, displaying quiet fear, as the marines prepare to leave the personnel carrier for the first time. Later though, in a close-up as she and Gorman are about to blow themselves up in the face of an overwhelming attack by the aliens, fear is shared between them. This is contrary to the behavior of Vasquez and Gorman the first time the aliens are encountered, when Vasquez erupted into violence with her gun while Gorman sat paralyzed by fear inside the personnel carrier. Fear is associated with a loss of control, and as it becomes shared by all of the humans, it becomes less gender-specific and less feminizing. When Vasquez asks Hudson if he had ever been mistaken for a man, she portends the stereotypically feminine whining he will display several times after the aliens are encountered the first time. Whining, though, becomes his unique expression of fear, as Newt’s ear-piercing screams are hers. Fear itself is ungendered.
Family and belonging are other motifs in Aliens, and it is through her bonding with others that Ripley is eventually able to banish the demon she feels she is becoming, the alien queen, and settle into a stabilized, womanly, role in a family.
But, Ripley’s womanliness is not portrayed with the same feminine frailty the Final Girl exhibits. Ripley’s self-absorbed whining subsides and transforms into aggression in several instances, each in connection with Newt. When the aliens first attack the marines, under the heat exchangers on LV-426, Ripley commandeers the personnel carrier after securing Newt in her seat and plows through the secreted resin of the aliens to rescue the marines. Later, when the aliens attack en masse in the control room, Ripley fires her assault rifle with Newt by her side. And finally, Ripley wields weapons when searching for Newt the alien lair, and dons a destructive exoskeleton to defend Newt from the queen back on board the Sulaco.
Ripley is gendered female through her maternal aggression, as is the queen. Both are defending their families. Newt is a surrogate for the daughter Ripley lost. She is the first person Ripley meets that Ripley can relate to. Like Ripley, Newt is a Final Girl, being the sole survivor of the colony, and Ripley is the first person from the Sulaco that she is willing to talk to. Hicks too is a member of this family.
Subsequent to Ripley rescuing the marines from under the heat-exchangers, the camera focuses on Hicks in the personnel carrier, then in a reverse shot freezes momentarily on Ripley’s smile as he agrees with her to return to the Sulaco to nuke the site from orbit. He and the other marines, at this point, have accepted Ripley into their midst. They all have a shared experience with the aliens. Most importantly, though, is that Ripley’s relationship with Hicks begins here and develops in concert with her relationship with Newt. It is Hicks who intimately shows Ripley how to fire the assault rifle and grenade launcher. It is also he who ends up clutching Ripley and Newt after the marines slay the freed face-huggers in the med-lab. The locator device passed from Hicks, to Ripley, to Newt, further establishes the connection between the three of them. After the sentry guns are installed in the tunnel, the camera zooms in on the locator as Hicks hands it to Ripley, then frames both of them in an intimate close-up as Hicks claims that the locator doesn’t mean that they are engaged. Later, in the med-lab, Ripley discusses death and aliens with Newt, who also suffers from nightmares, and gives her the locator. Afterwards, Ripley turns off the overhead lamp so that dark, ambient lighting warms her face, and she hugs and kisses Newt
In order for Ripley to achieve unity with Hicks and Newt, she must defeat the queen, whose egg-laying prowess far outstrips Ripley’s reproductive capacity and threatens the surviving humans with alien embryo implantations and death. Ripley, petite and soft in comparison, reflects a warmer, mammalian maternity than the monstrous and chitinous queen engenders. The queen’s penetrating jaws, and the phallic ovipositor the queen castrates in order to chase Ripley and Newt, highlight some sexual destabilization on her part, which Clover asserts is an aspect of the monolithic killers in slasher flicks (Clover, 40), and which feminizes Ripley even more in contrast. Both are protecting their people, but the queen’s intimacy with her brood is ambiguous. Additionally, the queen represents the source of the infected dreams and lifestyle Ripley acquired after awakening from her first alien encounter. The gravity of these factors is revealed when Ripley says to the alien queen on board the Sulaco, “Get away from her, you bitch!” Ripley maternally asserts her protectiveness of Newt and defines what must occur for her family to exist. By expelling the queen through the airlock of the Sulaco, Ripley purges herself of the nagging demons that used to alienate her from other people, and secures her maternal position as a woman in her family. At the conclusion of the film, Ripley, Newt, and Hicks are the only humans to survive the aliens. The closing credits begin to roll with Ripley sleeping behind Newt in a slightly elevated and protective way, in a medium shot aboard the Sulaco, with Newt asleep in a sleep-chamber in the foreground.
In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey describes the roles of men and women in Hollywood films in terms of Freudian scopophilia and Jaques Lacan’s mirror theory. To her, Women are coded for visual pleasure, while men are coded to be ideal egos, more perfect reflections of the male spectator, who drive the narratives. (Mulvey, 62-63). But she also asserts that women, by lacking penises, suggest castration, so women offer a threat of spectatorial dysphoria in addition to scopophilic pleasure, and so are fetishized and filmed from a sadistically voyeuristic perspective. (Mulvey, 64). While this psychoanalytic approach may explain to some small degree how filmmakers please male spectators, it doesn’t explain how they please female spectators. Additionally, it doesn’t explain the number of films over the last thirty years featuring fighting women.
Aliens portrays men and women in non-stereotypical ways. Although Ripley stimulates some male visual pleasure by walking around in her underwear and appearing more feminine than the people around her, her main role is to promote the narrative. This commingling of masculinity and femininity in characters can be seen in other action films as well. Sometimes, women produce visual pleasure while dominating males around them, as in blaxploitation films like Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1973) and Get Christie Love (William A. Graham, 1974), and as in more recent films like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McG, 2003) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), other times their sexiness or beauty is secondary to their role in visceral action sequences and pushing forward the narrative. These films subvert Mulvey’s observation that men drive the narrative with the support of women. The women like Ripley overtly carry the onus of being the ideal ego. The female spectator can identify directly with the femaleness of the characters, and, as Clover establishes, the male spectator easily slips into cross-gender identification to also cathect with them. (Clover, 47). Easy cross-gender identification, and stereotypically masculine fortitude and action scenes, are what make Lara Croft and Charlie’s Angels able to also act as ideal egos, even when shrouded in sexier coding.
Aliens is an experiment in cross-gendering. It takes stereotypically gendered elements, like gun-toting, fear, and affection, and exposes similarities and differences in the ways men and women shoulder them. Differences in the ways the sexes handle normalization in a mixed-gender group are subtextualized, as evidenced by the masculinized women and feminized men. As a leitmotif of the film, alienation also plays a major role in that its dissolution directly results from the sharing of feelings and participation in group activities. As Ripley engages in combat and her affections for Newt and Hicks are revealed, she increasingly becomes the member of a group of survivors. Through the support of the group, she matures from a scared Final Girl into a woman and ideal ego, in whom stereotypically feminine attributes are tempered by strength and a maternal role in a family. The turning point of this is when she battles the alien queen. By defeating her, Ripley transforms herself and Newt by nabbing security for herself and her family.
In slasher flicks, the key to the survival of the Final Girl may be her perfervid yen for belonging.
WORKS CITED
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP) 1992.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988).