Exploring the underlying anxieties around sexual assault, loss of bodily autonomy, and forced impregnation in Alien (1979).
From Merriam-Webster:
Rape: unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception
Sexual assault: illegal sexual contact that usually involves force upon a person without consent or is inflicted upon a person who is incapable of giving consent (as because of age or physical or mental incapacity) or who places the assailant (such as a doctor) in a position of trust or authority
After a short preface, in this piece, I’m going to watch through Alien (1979) and do a close reading of the text, exploring and analysing themes of and including:
- Rape and Sexual Assault
- Reproductive Coercion
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Loss of Bodily and Personal Autonomy
- The Body as a Resource — in regards to Labour and as a Worker, but also as a physical trading resource — in a society that desires profit
If any of these might be upsetting for you or you don’t feel as if you can stomach them at the moment, it might be a good idea to bookmark this piece and come back to it at another time.
This piece is going to go through the film Alien (1979) and talk in-depth about particular scenes in chronological order, with quotes from the script and screencaps throughout, so there will be spoilers for the whole of the film.
Preface
As a male victim, I often have mixed feelings about horror films that delve into themes of rape and sexual assault.
Frequently, because they’re written from a cisgender, heterosexual lens, they often ascribe themselves to certain fallacies about rape and sexual assault — unthinkingly, they create a world where rape and sexual assault only happen to women, and often only thin, white, pretty girls at that; they create a world where rape and sexual assault are only ever committed by men — and often scary, old men, often Black or disabled or otherwise othered and marginalised men — and most often against those thin, white, pretty girls.
Rape and sexual assault are often framed in our society as crimes of passion — a man so desperately wants a woman that he “has” to “have her”; a woman is “ravishingly” beautiful; a woman “asks for it” based on what she was wearing or how beautiful she was; a man “had needs” that could only be satisfied by his assault of a (beautiful) woman.
In actual fact, rape, and sexual assault are attacks that are most of all motivated by power and a desire to exact control over others. A rapist’s desire is, most of all, to subdue and dominate their victim and to show via the act of sexual assault that they have power their victim(s) do not.
Rape in many movies is often not really about what I would consider the real terror of that sexual invasion, the stripping away of my rights and control over my own body, the forcible submission of it to someone else’s will, power, and pleasure, but is more to do with attractiveness from the perspective of cisgender, heterosexual men, and even purity.
The horror of a pretty white girl being sexually assaulted by a scary outsider man has less to do with her control over her own body and more to do with her purity as an indicator of her value in society and, generally, about white anxieties — if her purity is attacked by an outside or “foreign” force, it’s an attack on “our” women as white people, and therefore on the strength of our patriarchal society. This is why the attacker must be in some way a foreigner or a social outcast, or socially deficient — if her attacker is attractive, handsome, and desirable as a husband, rape is far less of a concern.
Rape is more about damage to the goods — namely, a pretty white girl’s virginity and her purity for her future husband, and therefore her marketability as a later asset as wife and mother — than it is about her, her feelings, and her body.
Rape and sexual assault are legal terms, but the problem with defining an act of violence based on the weight it’s described within the law is that for some of us, our bodies might not always have been considered in law as vital or important.
Rape might be defined as the sexual penetrative assault of a woman by a man — if he doesn’t penetrate her, it’s a misdemeanor. If he’s her husband and she’s his wife, then no crime has occurred. If she’s his slave and he her master, then no crime has occurred. If she’s another man’s slave, perhaps he’s stolen from that man, but not her. If his victim is another man, it could well be that both of them are legally at fault for participating in the vile act of sodomy.
The definitions in law are provided and shaped by the society that creates and governs that law and will therefore be influenced by that society’s biases.
In line with this, many movies accept rape and sexual coercion as a fact of life or even a natural and romantic part of engagement between a man and a woman — just look at Passengers (2016), a supposed science-fiction romance.
Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is in a hibernation pod on a vessel that will take 120 years to reach its destination and wakes from this sleep after an accident. With no way to return himself from hibernation or to contact outside authorities, he’s the only person awake on the vessel.
After a year of loneliness, he selects the female passenger he finds most desirable, obsessively watching her video diaries to understand her and better manipulate and coerce her, wakes her up from her hibernation — and proceeds to lie to her that she was woken by accident as well, the better to coerce her into a relationship with him. In effect, he has killed her so that he can take sexual command of her body, and the two of them are stranded alone in space where she can access no outside help or assistance.
At the end of the film, this is played as romantic and loving, the two of them playing out a saccharine Adam and Eve fantasy together, although Armand D on YouTube has recut an excellent (and far more understandable) version of the trailer as sci-fi horror.
When this is the state of sexual coercion as portrayed even in modern films, Alien (1979) is a breath of fresh air.
Here is a horror film about rape — and not just rape, but forced impregnation and reproductive coercion — that doesn’t use the word rape, doesn’t use words like sexual violence. Although the reproductive threat remains the same and the alien herself is phallic in appearance, the xenomorph’s assault is a degree removed from “actual” on-screen sex, so those words are never needed. The xenomorph penetrates her prey via her facehuggers, and through this process, impregnates them against their will, sometimes without even their awareness. It is a direct parallel to sexual violence amongst human predators and their victims but is not in itself sexual when presented on screen.
Because it doesn’t use those words, we strip off the assumptions people have about the gendered aspect of this sort of violence. In the sci-fi setting, using a unisex cast and also introducing androids as well as human beings, we also strip off the forced binary of male and female.
In Alien (1979), it’s not just cisgender women who are at risk of being forcibly impregnated with a dangerous parasite that could kill them as it grows inside them, as with human pregnancy as assumed by cis society — it’s everybody. And because the monster is an alien — a big, clawed alien that’s very penis-like in its design — there is not the same ability for the filmmakers to in some way romanticise or downplay the violence of the assault.
There’s no need to humanise the rapist or explain that he’s a lonely man who just wants female companionship, really, and shouldn’t society provide for a man like him? Isn’t the real cause of his violence against women that no woman provided for him, to cater to his needs as a man?
There’s no need to humanise the xenomorph or her facehuggers — they are alien creatures who seek only to breed and survive. They have no voice, only violent action.
But here comes the real horror of the film and what ramps up the terror inherent in it: yes, the xenomorph and her children are acting only on instinct, but Earth’s society is thinking about the value of it. The xenomorph’s offspring might be worth money. They might be converted into weapons and fire power, and scientific advancement.
In real life, the damage is losing the rapists who work at the company, or dealing with the media fall-out that might occur if rape victims spoke up about toxic work environments, or the legal fees that might be incurred — and thus, victims are silenced, let go, the working culture makes certain to defend and further enfranchise abusers while silencing and disenfranchising victims.
In Alien, The Company does what any company does in our society. It measures the damage caused by not just the assaults and the coerced impregnation and the death that will be caused in the result, against the potential profit of the xenomorph’s DNA, no matter how scary or violent or traumatising the xenomorph and its behaviours are.
Alien (1979) then becomes a perfect metaphor and parallel for sexual violence in our society — and especially as a male victim of sexual violence myself, but also as a transgender man, it really cuts to the core of the horror of it for me.
Yes, it’s terrifying to be raped, but it’s not terrifying because men are strong, and they all want to rape women, who are always so pure and innocent — women rape other women or men or nonbinary people; men rape other men and the same; corporations and other for-profit enterprises might work towards invasions and corruptions of individual bodily autonomy because it benefits them monetarily or societally; other political and governing bodies might work toward the same.
The terror of rape is in the invasion of your body against your will, your powerlessness to stop it or defend yourself, whether by force or coercion. It’s in the collapse of your desires for your body and its purpose as you see it to that of another person’s, or a third party’s.
And when that rape can come with the threat of pregnancy, there is a further terror — can you access emergency contraceptive and/or abortion services? Will they be delivered to you without prejudice and without delay? Will you be forced to submit to further invasions of your body, having a rape kit done, being tested for STIs, and having to describe your assault to police or to other violent authority figures, who as you describe it, will demean and undermine you, and do anything to discredit your testimony? Will you have to flee your state or country to get medical services to end a pregnancy? Will you be blocked off from these and forced by the state to carry a pregnancy to term, on top of having already been raped by an individual?
Unlike many other horror movies about rape, no one gets raped in Alien (1979), and then at the end, does a stirring monologue to sad piano music about how, yes, they were raped and attacked, but they couldn’t possibly kill “an innocent life” by having an abortion, because any female rape victim’s natural instinct is, of course, to want to be a mother to their rapist’s children. Anti-abortion activists aren’t putting facehuggers on their posters and their propaganda.
With those broad strokes of why I appreciate the film’s take on this idea of horror, let’s get into the actual film.
We open on the commercial towing vehicle, The Nostromo, which is on its way back to Earth following a mining operation. The film starts us off with a clear set of parameters, apart from its sci-fi setting, which will come with assumptions on our part.
Twenty million tons of ore is no small amount, so we can assume that the amount of ore being moved is worth a lot of money to the company it belongs to — the fact that the crew of this huge vessel is limited only to seven is significant too, as that’s quite a small crew for such a huge ship and with so much space on it. We might assume that this is done for cost reasons.
And finally, the fact that this is a commercial vehicle that’s towing the results of a mining operation might have us assume that the people involved in this operation are not rich, upper-class people, and aren’t necessarily hands-off academics or bureaucrats. The people on this vessel, class-wise, are almost certainly closer in terms of their economic class — and thus societal value — to the miners and smelters who have harvested and refined the ore they’re transporting than they are to their big bosses or otherwise, they’d be travelling in luxury, not in a cryo-bay on a huge vessel to keep them from using up too many expensive resources.
The establishing shots introduce us to the interior of the Nostromo, and at the same time, show the insidiousness of the threat afoot — we do not see it face-on, not to begin with. The threat aboard the vessel is invisible, as it isn’t yet here.
We see small impacts and effects — a rustle here, a knocked helmet there, some papers dislodged — that may or may not have something to do with the threat, but we do not see the beast itself nor its children as yet. An empty helmet oversees the initial warning but cannot respond — it is only an empty vessel for a viewer or actor, or authority.
As a viewer seeing this film for the first time, we don’t know that they haven’t encountered the xenomorph for the first time yet: for all we know, the invisible threat is already there. It might exist, and might be present, but cannot be seen, cannot be remarked upon, and cannot therefore be acted against until it is too late.
Although we live in a society that sets up the conditions for rape and sexual assault in a thousand ways — via economic and class disparity, via gender and sexual disparity, racial, ethnic, and caste disparity, and disabled and abled disparity; in short, by setting up a thousand ways in which one person can leverage power and control to assault and/or coerce another, due to the inequalities between them — many people believe that rape is not something that can be prevented. They only care (sometimes) that it should be punished.
And rape cannot be punished until a rape has been committed. Until someone has already been victimised.
The seven crewmembers of the Nostromo are under exactly equal conditions as they are introduced by the shot — we see them in their cryo chambers, and as they sleep, they are apparently almost identical in their unconsciousness, in their poses, and even in what they’re wearing — uniform white shorts and sensor pads on their chests and necks, stripped down to as little as possible. To the right, you can see that Ripley has a white tape covering the nipples on her breasts, but this is an unobtrusive detail.
For the most part, the crew are presented as a unit of presumably identical value to one another, and as a collective who share the same cryo-unit — although Kane (John Hurt) rises from his cryo-sleep before the others, this isn’t because he is afforded some particular privilege as Executive Officer. We already see the other crew beginning to stir in their beds.
Similarly, when we see the crew sitting around the table laughing, drinking, eating, and smoking, it’s a circular table — even Ripley’s cat, Jonesy, is present.
And yet what is the immediate subject of conversation? The lack of equity in their pay.
Dallas’ (Tom Skerritt) remark is significant in response to Brett’s (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker’s (Yaphet Kotto) objections is notable: You get what you’re contracted for, just like everybody else.
Brett and Parker are speaking about what they feel is the unfairness of the situation, that they’re not to be given “full” shares — Dallas makes no commentary as to equity or equality of their circumstances but instead brings it back to the equity of their contracts. Equality in circumstance is irrelevant — what matters is the letter of the law.
We also see at this point that while the ship itself is named Nostromo, the ship’s computer is named Mother, and they call her that, as well as referring to her by that name amongst each other. There are a few other pieces of language that carry on that metaphor as the film continues — for example, when the ship comes away from Nostromo’s dock, they refer to the umbilicus.
As the Nostromo moves through empty space, the nav crew begins to realize that they’ve been woken early from their cryo-sleep, and they bicker with each other as Dallas speaks with Mother.
While Parker and Brett are the same as the rest of the crew in sleeping and eating, only Parker is pushed to finish his coffee quicker than the rest by Dallas, and we then see Parker and Brett discussing the inequality of their situation as they walk through the bowels of the ship.
Compare the three shots above to one another — the crew on the bridge, Dallas speaking to Mother, and Parker and Brett moving through one of the corridors.
There are two primary differences between the crew here that show their inequality apart from their discussion of the facts — that Parker and Brett receive a half-share and the implication that they do more physical labour than the officers do as engineers.
Firstly, we see that while the rest of the crew are in uniform, Brett is wearing his own article overtop — a Hawaiian shirt — and Parker is wearing a bandana around his head. Perhaps they don’t expect to be seen when they arrive to Earth, or perhaps they just aren’t held to the same account of formality as the others.
But secondly, and far more obviously… Parker and Brett don’t have the lights turned on for them. While the cryo chambers and the dining hall have overhead lighting, and while the bridge and ops rooms both have overhead lighting, Parker and Brett don’t get that. They’re simply walking through darkened corridors and only using the auxiliary lighting coming through the grates to get by.
Some more interesting crew dynamics between Parker and Brett, as we see the small ship land — Parker and Brett are obviously accustomed to lying and making estimates to the senior officers that aren’t necessarily accurate (for example, Brett saying seventeen hours, and Parker quoting twenty-five), but they’re also pissed at the idea of Ripley coming down and having a look as well.
It’s not because Ripley’s a woman — it’s because she’s a Warrant Officer, not an engineer or technician and because the presence of an authority down where they are introduces a level of surveillance (and thus direct accountability to a higher power) that they obviously want to avoid.
Similarly, Parker’s immediate response to the unknown signal is that they shouldn’t respond to it because they’re a commercial vessel, and he only backs down at the understanding that not seeking out the source would be a violation of his contract. As he says to Brett, though, his frustration is partly that the higher crew see themselves as entitled to the engineers’ time and labour, the dirtier and more demanding labour that the ship is reliant on to move, and yet at the same time, the two of them receive half-shares.
It’s also noteworthy that while Kane volunteers, Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is ordered down onto the planet’s surface by Dallas, and she seems less than enthused about the idea.
The conversation between Ripley, Parker, and Brett is obviously loaded — Parker is leaning up on a wall, one hip cocked, and he and Brett present a united party, still trying to debate their shares. Ripley is barely being heard as she says they’re guaranteed a share by law — and then tells them to fuck off when Parker is obviously taking the piss. She’s down in their territory, and they’re surrounded by squealing steam, which literally drowns out her voice — and that Parker is apparently able to easily turn off when it suits him.
Look at the alien sitting back and the pose it’s in — we see its ribcage, the lined chair or back to it, its head, and then the huge protrusion going out from what would be the alien’s crotch, assuming it had a physicality similar to a human’s. Phallic, no?
Meanwhile, Kane wants to jump into a deep, mysterious hole. Don’t we all, my friend?
RIPLEY: It doesn’t look like an SOS… It looks like a warning. I’m gonna go out after them.
ASH: What’s the point? I mean, by the time it takes to get there, they’ll know if it’s a warning or not.
We obviously don’t know that Ash (Ian Holm) is an android yet, but I just wanted to draw attention to this snippet of dialogue because he is the voice of cold, corporate cost-effectiveness, so to speak. He sees this situation in terms of sunk cost — whether Ripley goes or not, Lambert, Kane, and Dallas are already there.
While Ripley’s intentions are obviously to help, and her instinct is to go and give the crew more information, even at potential risk to herself, Ash just doesn’t think like that.
In this case, Ash is absolutely right, in my opinion, but to draw a parallel to how a company draws up, for example, their sexual harassment policies — many of them didn’t or wouldn’t put them in place until after there was or is a problem. Why talk about it until it’s an issue, right? Why arm someone with foreknowledge when they probably already know the risks from personal experience?
Anyway, back to gently lowering John Hurt into a big hole. A hole that’s huge and cavernous, and also so wet inside, and also noticeably moist.
And dangerous. “And it’s full of leathery objects… Like eggs or something!”
(This is all going in my new Grindr profile.)
We see Kane approach one of the eggs and, as any of us would, I’m sure, try to find some sort of orifice.
Hmm! Gross!
As Kane leans in to look through, the gross contents of the egg explode with life — in this case, a facehugger slamming against the glass casement of his helmet. It’s sudden, violent, and scary, with even the hugger itself screaming!
Ripley cites quarantine procedures and notes that they should be quarantined for 24 hours, which Dallas immediately overrides, insisting that Kane could die in the intervening time —
And yet it’s Ash who lets them in.
Interesting, right? Because ten minutes ago, Ash was the one insisting Ripley stay behind, bearing in mind the potential risk to an additional crewmember that ultimately would have no reward. Here, he’s doing the opposite: at the potential risk to the ship, including himself, Ripley, Brett, and Parker, he’s allowing the three crewmembers in who have had contact with a hostile, possibly dangerous lifeform.
Obviously, he knows something that we (and the rest of the crew) don’t and has a secret mission in mind, but as a viewer, we don’t know that yet. We only have the juxtaposition of his cost-effectiveness doing an immediate flip in the other direction as soon as the stakes jump higher.
Let’s talk about the design of the facehugger.
All-encompassing, creepy as Hell, and your chest feels a bit tight just to look at it — with its jointed, spider-like limbs, the facehugger clasps around the back and sides of its host’s head, its breathing flaps pressing either side of its jaw, its tail coiling tightly around their throat. This gives it additional purchase, keeping it tightly adhered to its host’s face, and at the same time allows it to stabilise their throat and control their breathing — to choke them by tightening its grip, as needed.
Here’s a screenshot from Aliens: Dark Descent, just so you can see what the facehugger’s underside looks like:
Yonic, no? Where the xenomorph’s head is phallic in shape, the facehugger’s “face” resembles a vulva. Neat!
Anyway, it’s so fucking scary because of how utterly overwhelming it is, entirely obfuscating the face and adhering itself fully to its victim. Its flaps move just enough to allow you to breathe, but you’re rendered utterly powerless and overwhelmed by it.
When Ash tries to squeeze and bend one of its “fingers,” it moves to choke Kane with its tail — it doesn’t know necessarily that it’s doing that, is only tightening its grip to ensure it can’t be moved, but that’s not the point.
Dallas asks, “What’s it got down his throat?”
Ash suggests that the facehugger is feeding him oxygen, although we know it’s feeding him a bit more — the invasion of the throat is traumatic. I say this as someone who deep throats cock on the reg — when you’re not expecting it (and sometimes, even when you are), the shock of it goes through your whole nervous system.
The gag reflex, when it engages, doesn’t just make you cough — it can make your whole body clench, make your eyes water, and tighten your throat to better get you to hack up whatever invader is inside it, cutting off your air. It can be overwhelming, too, to be penetrated orally by someone who grips you by the air and not just feeds their cock over your tongue and as deep into your throat as they can get but at the same time crushes your face against their belly, where taken to the root you’ll be able to feel the weight of their bollocks against your chin, where your nose is pressed and impacted by their abdomen and at the same time, your mouth and throat are full.
I enjoy it, but of course, it’s not for everybody.
The facehugger goes a step beyond the rough blowjob, blinding its victim and gripping around their entire face, as well as knocking them into a coma so that the gag reflex doesn’t keep engaging, and so they don’t keep struggling — and yet at the same time, it penetrates them. It coils a tail around their throat to better choke them, as needed. “Hug” is a sort of nice word for what they do — nicer than the truth of the invasion, of the impact it has.
If someone tries to rape your face with their cock, they often have to do it with a knife to your throat or some other implicit threat in place because the human mouth is full of teeth, and it’s not that hard to use them — it’s so easy, in fact, that if you enjoy giving a rough consensual blowjob, you have to learn a particular way to relax your jaw, hold your head at the right angle, and sometimes cover your teeth with your lips, just to make sure you’re not scraping your partner’s cock by accident, or at least, not scraping it dangerously hard. Even if unconscious, a rapist would have to be careful to avoid your teeth as they thrust inside you — obviously, in this case, thrusting isn’t a risk factor.
But unlike in a real-life oral rape, impregnation is.
Ash suggests that the facehugger is what’s keeping Kane alive in an attempt to convince Dallas to leave it in place for further study, but Dallas overrules him and says that he wants to remove it, and then we see another layer of the xenomorph’s protective qualities:
Its acidic blood.
I just want to note here that like… Just like the facehugger isn’t really choking Kane — in that this isn’t a conscious act of violence it’s doing, it isn’t done out of deliberation — the xenomorph’s blood isn’t so acidic just to harm people either.
The xenomorph is an intelligent predator that seeks to reproduce efficaciously, but it isn’t cruel; it isn’t sadistic: it is an animal doing its best to survive. It is frightening, yes, and it is dangerous, yes, but in neither case is it so because it wants to frighten or harm the humans around it — it is acting on its instincts.
It’s one of the reasons I so love the xenomorph’s numerous harms to the humans it encounters as a metaphor for sexual violence — the actual assaults on the flesh and the body are analogous to real-life assaults, including the reproductive effects, but the social aspects are not. The secondary horror of Alien, after the bodily invasion, is in corporate desire to allow for, enable, and even assist the xenomorph in its actions no matter the cost of human life because of the profit to be gained as a result, and that’s analogous to real life too.
It’s interesting seeing Ripley in Ash’s space here — she exists as a literal shadow in this shot, a dark stain on the process of his work, and indicative of the spanner she’s going to throw into his works as the film goes on.
They both use he/him pronouns for the facehugger, and Ash talks about the facehugger’s resistance to adverse physical conditions, effectively making reference to the fact that the facehugger can survive anywhere (just like rape culture).
Look at how Ash is framed in this shot, too — it’s from quite close up, and because of the cramped nature of the space with one wall to his left and the unit in front of him, he looks particularly small in it. It’s undoubtedly a space that Ripley is encroaching on in Ash’s mind.
Look at Ripley here in contrast — the science deck opens up a bit behind her, not appearing as cramped or as close, and the camera is on a level with her face rather than shooting from slightly above, so she ends up further dominating the screen and seeming more powerful as a result. Where she appears as a shadow on Ash’s screen, he doesn’t even merit a reflection on hers.
Ripley is confident and comfortable here, just as she was comfortable down in the engineering bay, despite the similar frustration of Parker and Brett, also feeling that she’s invading.
The cadence of their conversation is interesting here — Holm plays Ash as not very personable and with some traits of what seems to appear as constant anxiety: the way he twitches and shifts, his many blinks, the way his body language often involves shrinking in on himself. He feels fundamentally insecure in his position because while he’s been manipulating other members of the crew and going unnoticed, he’s aware that Ripley has clocked that something’s up, and he doesn’t know what to do or how to justify it.
Look at the challenge on her face, the direct gaze of her eyes, the slight tilt of her head as she says to Ash, “And you let him in.”
ASH: I was obeying a direct order, remember?
RIPLEY: Ash, when Dallas and Kane are off the ship, I’m senior officer.
ASH: Oh, yes. I forgot.
That rhetorical flex, asking Ripley, “Remember?” is a weak attempt at getting the blame shifted to Dallas’ orders rather than his own actions, and it shows as even more transparent with the lame addition of his, “I forgot,” with the two short, stunted sentences, abortive, before he hardens and shows a bit more anger at being challenged so directly.
She notes the chain of command here, that she’s the commanding officer when the senior officers are off the ship, and he claims to have forgotten — he didn’t forget the quarantine law; he could be relied upon to quote their contract directly to Parker in the initial scenes. In short, Ash doesn’t forget anything.
Ripley has noticed that something is suspicious in Ash’s behaviour, and I really love seeing her challenge him on it — the thing about Ripley going into spaces like the engineering bay or Ash’s science lab here, much like her taking the initiative to start translating the beacon through Mother earlier on, and much like her behaviour throughout, is that like…
Ripley is hands-on; she’s solution-oriented. She isn’t passive, and she isn’t reactionary, either — she seeks problems out, looks for incongruities, and begins to attend to them before they can start becoming a problem. And Ash? His behaviour is indicative of a problem.
RIPLEY: Unfortunately, by breaking quarantine, you risk everybody’s life.
ASH: Maybe I should have left him outside. Maybe I’ve jeopardised the rest of us, but it was a risk I was willing to take.
RIPLEY: It’s a pretty big risk for a science officer. It’s, uh, not exactly out of the manual, is it?
ASH, softer: I do take my responsibilities as seriously as you, you know.
It’s obvious that that’s not true, and you can see in Ripley’s face that she doesn’t believe it, that she knows something’s off, even if Ash won’t admit it.
Apart from Holm’s depiction of Ash’s anxiety, I find it interesting that when being challenged and when attempting to make himself appear as more assertive or more confident in his position, Ash doesn’t stand tall and cross his arms, puff out his chest, or put his hands down at his sides, or even put both his hands on his hips — he puts one hand on his hip, staying bent over. He makes himself broader but at the same time shrinks himself back into his space — putting a hand on the hip like he’s doing doesn’t make you more ready for a fight, or imply you’re more ready for a fight; it just gives him slightly more stability.
Ripley obviously is willing to let the matter drop for now, and as soon as she leaves Ash’s space, we see him fold outward, stand up taller, and then move out from where he’s been curled protectively inward to outside of the science bay.
Dallas, of course, calls on Ripley to come along as soon as Ash calls him down to the medical bay, and I just love this shot — the juxtaposition of Kane’s sleeping body, lit up and prone but apparently peaceful, with the agonising anticipation of the scene itself, as Ash, Kane, and Ripley slowly inch into the medical bay with no certainty as to where the facehugger is, and if it’s still a threat.
There’s a continuous choice made with sound in this film where one person’s regular breathing is put at the forefront of the sound mix — earlier, when they were exploring the alien vessel, the crew’s breathing was exaggerated because they were all in their suits, and Lambert’s anxious breathing particularly was emphasised; here, Kane’s breathing is highlighted where he’s laid down on the table. It’s a constant rhythm in the background of the scene, breaking what would otherwise be silence, and is slightly anxiety-inducing, just a little creepy, the hiss of his exhalations.
I love that we initially see the facehugger’s tail hang down before the rest of the creature drops, and the body language here — Ripley shoves herself up against the wall, her knees together, her legs curling under her body, and Dallas slides across the floor to be in front of her, where she wraps her arms around him — to keep him in front of her as a shield, but at the same time, clasping at him to prevent him from leaning closer to the threat.
Slightly less vulva-like than the newer design but still not entirely unlike one. Obviously, this facehugger is dead and spent, but the design of the folds, the colour, and the wetness to it are evocative even though they’re not pretty.
I love once again the cramped conditions as Ash, Ripley, and Dallas lean in to examine the dead facehugger all at once, and the fact that Ash has to ask Ripley to move to reach for a tool.
Ripley’s immediate response to the facehugger is to get rid of it, to which Ash responds that, of course, they need to study it, to test it, because it’s a new species they’re not familiar with.
And yet Ripley focuses on the potential risk of it — this thing has already bled acid, and they don’t know how it will respond to its own death and decay, what the potentials are as it degrades and breaks down.
Dallas, though, defers to Ash as their science officer, and they’re chained by the chain of command — Except that this situation is slightly different, isn’t it? Again, Ripley clocks that something’s up, and she calls Dallas out on it. Dallas was presumably about to go back out to the shuttle to resume his misty-eyed activity of feeling guilty in the dark while listening to classical music, but here’s Ripley calling him out and literally changing their environment — closing the next door — to trap him in the space with her and force him to face the music.
DALLAS: Look, I just run the ship! Anything that has to do with the science division, Ash has the final word.
RIPLEY: How does that happen?
DALLAS: It happens, my dear, because that’s what the company wants to happen.
RIPLEY: Since when is that standard procedure?
DALLAS: Standard procedure is to do what the Hell they tell you to do.
Ripley, as Warrant Officer, is one of the more junior officers on the ship, but is still an officer in the chain of command, and this is frustrating for her because it’s not within the chain of command. The usual system of authority has been changed and interrupted in-line with an abrupt shift in company policy — and this shift in company policy is being made by bureaucrats who are countless thousands of miles away, far away from the threat that the seven of them are trapped with on this vessel.
Again, this is a huge vessel with room for seven crew members. They are shipping millions upon millions of tons of refined mineral ore on a ship more than large enough to accommodate all that space, and yet all their cryo-beds are in one chamber, their mess hall is even smaller than that, some of them don’t even get the lights turned on as they traverse the corridors. Everything about the crew conditions on this ship — right down to the half-shares for the engineers — has been calibrated for cost-effectiveness, and that generally includes a lot of safety protocol. After all, when you only have the bare minimum of people on the ship, you don’t want to lose more.
So what’s changed, all of a sudden? Protocol and standard procedure — put in place to protect the crew, to protect the cargo, to protect the ship — have been replaced with whatever the company wants from them.
Ripley, earlier on in the text, mentions that Parker and Brett have a legal right to their share, and she generally follows most procedure — she knows her rights, and she actually does care about fairness and equity. Here, Dallas — someone she respects — seems to have stopped caring about these things, and she’s trying to figure out why.
She asks if Dallas has worked with Ash before, and Dallas says, no, he was a replacement for their previous science officer two days before departure. Ripley doesn’t trust him — and does Dallas?
“I don’t trust anybody.”
Ripley can see that she’s being dismissed as Dallas changes the subject to the repairs instead — her eyes drop from his face, breaking his gaze — and yet once again, as they continue their discussion of repairs, Dallas is throwing aside procedure. There are still less urgent repairs to complete, but Dallas is in a hurry to leave — yet another sign that something’s off, where they’re facing risks that simply aren’t necessary.
We then see the crew discussing Kane, where Parker again says he thinks Kane should be frozen before they finally head along to the medbay to see him.
I would note that Ash has a tendency of trying to expose people, especially Dallas, to the xenomorph as much as possible — the scene before, when summoning Dallas to the medbay, he didn’t explain and just said he should come; here, again:
ASH: Dallas, I think you should see Kane.
DALLAS: Why, has his condition changed?
ASH: It’s simpler if you come.
Like, it’s a radio. He could have just said Kane was awake, that he was in recovery, could have explained anything, but he keeps conversations over the radio as abortive as possible to bring Dallas — and in this case, the rest of the crew — over to have a look and to be potentially exposed.
Ash doesn’t know much by way of specifics, but as an android, he knows he isn’t going to be at risk in the same way the organics on the ship are, so he obviously wants as many people in close contact to Kane as possible so that whatever they’re dealing with will be contained to them.
Kane remembers being smothered, in some way, but doesn’t recall the specifics.
We see Parker flirting with Lambert here — “I’d rather be eating something else, but right now, I’m thinking of food,” and Lambert laughs. Parker was, of course, flirting unsuccessfully with Ripley earlier too, but his focus is immediately back to Kane. Part of the flirting, I think, is just to show that he’s sexy and hot, to affirm his masculinity — it’s about his positioning compared to the women around him as much as it is about any attraction he might feel to them.
As Kane begins to cough and splutter, Ash is not surprised, and you see him hesitate for a bit with his face blank before he jumps into the action and holds Kane down with the rest of them.
Lambert is spattered with blood as Kane’s chest bursts, and what is birthed from the remains of his ribcage?
A baby xenomorph. While it has the same long, prehensile tail as the facehugger, its make-up is quite penile — a long, thick shaft with a blunt head, and while, of course, it has teeth and screams, it is phallic in its basic appearance. Bursting out from Kane’s destroyed ribcage, we see a simulation here of the violence of birth — its mother, Kane, is bleeding and dying beneath it, and the xenomorph has come into the world with a spatter of blood and no comprehension of the damage it has done.
Parker immediately picks up a knife to kill it, and of course, Ash stands in the way, protecting it — “Don’t touch it!” — and gives the xenomorph the time and opportunity to flee the mess hall and get away from them.
Only now do we see Kane’s body expelled into space.
Do they want to study the damage the xenomorph did to his corpse? Perform a full autopsy, and understand how and why it did what it did to his body? No. What has happened to Kane is horrific and unutterable, but more importantly, it has rendered Kane disposable. Kane is no longer important, and he ceased to be important as soon as he was impregnated: all that mattered from that moment, and all that matters now, is his offspring.
“Catch it, put it in the airlock, get rid of it,” is Dallas’ instruction for capturing it — and yet, they aren’t trying to kill it, but merely stun it with the cattle prod and put it outside. Obviously, they don’t want it to bleed.
Obviously, for Ash, at least, they want it to survive.
After their unsuccessful attempt to accidentally trap Jones the cat, we see Brett split off from Parker and Ripley as the most junior crew member, and searching alone for him. The lack of music in this scene as well as the background heartbeat really adds to the building sense of dread as he miaows back and forth with the cat, and look at this close shot, how you can see every line and angle in his face, how you can see the sweat on his jaw, how much you can see the whites of his eyes.
Then Brett discovers the xenomorph’s shed skin:
It’s just because the skin is also made of wet latex, but the way Brett picks it up and the way he drops it on the floor really reminds me of someone picking up and then dropping a used condom — the way he carefully picks it up by the edge with his thumb and forefinger, how it slowly peels off the floor, how he’s disgusted as he examines it, and then how his eyes widen as he realises what it is and drops it with a crinkling splat.
Then he steps over it and leaves it in place, discarded. Not his problem. Not his mess.
There are a few recurring trends in shots across the Alien films that add to the broader narrative and the fears in it — continuously, the characters are moving through darkened corridors and going through tightening apertures, and at the same time, the camera regularly focuses — as it does in this scene — on long, straight implements and pieces of machinery. We are continuously moving through corridors and openings, and at the same time, we focus regularly on shafts and phallic objects and the imposing nature of their structure, like in this shot where the camera focuses on a piece of machinery and slowly pans up its length.
And here’s another recurring theme — a desire to be cleansed.
Brett enters into the bright, white light, removing his cap and baring his head to the purifying whiteness of it, after which he tips back his head to allow water to drip over his bare face. He wants to be washed clean of his fear of the situation, of the anxiety he’s experiencing, but also like —
In a film that, below the surface, has themes of sexual violence, I really like this as a motif.
In a society such as the one we live in, where sex and sexuality are often linked to dirtiness or filthiness, there is often a sense of shame about sex, but particularly about having been sexually assaulted. In being raped or assaulted, or even just threatened with assault, there is a desire to wash ourselves and absolve ourselves of the feeling, to scrub off the sticky, cloying weight of threatened exploitation, or of someone else’s unwanted desire.
Here, Brett hasn’t yet been assaulted by the xenomorph or infected by it, and there is no similar link of filth or lack of cleanliness with the alien — he just wants the relief of the water, which at the same time is shown with that white light symbolising purity as something that should be cleansing, or absolving.
And it isn’t enough. It doesn’t matter how clean he is, or how worthy of absolution — he will be victimised, because he is there, and so is the xenomorph.
Here is the head of the xenomorph, now far bigger — it’s larger, smoother, but still has a long, shaft-shaped head, and it’s dripping with wetness. As Brett looks up at it, he stares directly into its teeth, which are dripping with a similar water to the drip he was just bathing in, and yet here, he will not be cleansed nor purified. He will be consumed and put to the xenomorph’s reproductive purpose.
And Jones, able to comprehend the threat but not necessarily the gravity of it, or what its impact could be, watches silently as he’s lifted up into the rafters, lit by white light, a sort of parody of the traditional alien abduction where someone is lifted into the sky by the beam from a space ship:
PARKER: I mean, it’s like a man, it’s big!
ASH: Kane’s son.
This theme continues into the rest of the Alien franchise, but there’s something so intriguing to me about the android’s fascination and delight with the xenomorph’s reproductive cycle. Ash’s tone here, his expression, is quiet and solemn, so out of place with the rest of the crew’s anxiety and their entirely understandable fear — it’s nigh worshipful.
To the android, made and formed from scratch by intelligent creators they can name and track and even have conversations with, there is no great mystery or intrigue or secret at the start of their creation or at the zenith of its process — and yet human reproduction is so messy, and so bound up in a great many social rules and norms that the android, by definition, is outside of, unbound by and yet judged by the standards of.
The xenomorph has no need for social graces, and she does not hold anyone to account for them. She takes what she requires and does what she needs to survive — she is cold, efficient, and ruthless.
Even before the rest of the crew knows that Ash is an android, you see the moments of absolute discomfort here — Dallas and Ripley both turn their faces for a moment, and you see their respective expressions of discomfort and uncertainty. What the fuck is up with this guy?
Ripley then tries to deflect the conversation away from Ash’s admiration to Ash’s expertise actually helping them, although admittedly, Ash is pretty vague about the whole thing. “Most animals retreat from fire,” isn’t exactly keenly insightful commentary, but this is on brand with Ash’s approach so far, right?
So here, we see Dallas seek support, seek assurance, from a higher power: from Mother. She is the ultimate authority as far goes theoretical knowledge on the ship, with more data than any of the crew could ever be capable of holding or computing themselves, and programmed to advise them on any imaginable scenario.
And she has nothing of use to tell him.
She cannot compute their situation, nor his — she can’t even offer a percentage estimate of his likelihood of survival, nor of the crew’s or the ship’s.
Once more, we see a series of opening ports and long tunnel images, once again mirroring the visual imagery we’d employ for a birth canal, particularly this opening aperture with the crew on the other side:
Dallas enters these narrow canals, dark, cramped, and vulnerable. He is alone, separated from the rest of the crew, as they attempt to narrow down the xenomorph’s operating field by opening and closing the junction corridors; they track him carefully, and they stay in contact with him over the radio. Is that enough to protect him from a predator determined to victimise him?
When your friend is on their way home, and you say, “text me when you’re home,” and you track them on their Snapchat map just in case, and maybe even talk to them on the phone so you can hear them, and they can hear you… Is that enough?
No. Not always.
I want to talk about Lambert’s fear for a minute.
We know from Aliens (1986, dir. James Cameron) that Joan Lambert is an intersex woman (referred to in the Alien universe as a “Despin Convert”, referring to an in-universe Despin’s method of sex reassignment surgery), and she’s the only woman aboard apart from Ripley, who was originally written as a male character.
Ripley isn’t unemotive — she cries over Dallas’ death and over other stresses in the movie, she freezes several times with fear, and she becomes overcome with anger a few times, particularly at Ash — but Lambert is, of course, far more so.
She’s in tears basically from as soon as the xenomorph is introduced, and she sobs and becomes more and more desperate as the xenomorph gets closer to Dallas in the chute, all but begging him to move — only a few minutes before this scene, she — apparently naively — asks Ripley, looking up at her with wet eyes and no small amount of hope in her voice, if she thinks Brett might still be alive. She crumples when Ripley tells her no.
Her response is completely understandable given that there’s a horrible monster that’s going to do body horror to the crew aboard — the rest of the crew are better able to repress their feelings and bite them down (as with Ripley, Brett, and Dallas) or redirect and express their feelings with anger or laughter (as with Ripley again, and with Parker), but Lambert struggles to compartmentalise her feelings in that way.
I feel like Lambert is often treated as annoying by many fans of the series because she’s so emotive, because she cries and sobs and is so “uncontrolled” in those tears, but I just ache for her. Of those aboard, she’s the one who understands body horror most of all and has the most intimate relationship with it, I would argue. Intersex people today are frequently surgically altered as babies without any ability on their part to meaningfully understand or consent to the procedures, often leading to life-long health concerns, complications, gender dysphoria, and other issues, not to mention the straightforward trauma of having your bodily autonomy thrown aside so callously, your body modified for no real health reason, and only to suit the whim or sensibilities of your doctors or guardians.
We don’t know if Lambert has received targeted harassment due to her status, but we do know that in the Alien timeline, misogyny is still alive and well — we might look at Parker and Brett’s flirtation with Ripley, we might look at Parker’s sexual comments, we might look at Dallas calling Ripley pet names when he’s arguing with her and trying to shut down her anger in the corridor, all this without mentioning scenes in latter movies, such as the attempted gang rape scene in Alien 3 (1992, dir. David Fincher) — and if the Alien universe parallels our own, women are assumed to be the targets of all sexual violence and are conditioned and taught to be more fearful of it, often in a culture that encourages victim-blaming and personal responsibility for guarding oneself against rape.
Here, the threat is just as invisible, insidious, and, whether expected or unexpected, just as inescapable — is it any wonder Lambert is so fucking terrified?
Rape and sexual assault themselves are horrific, are traumatising. They’re invasions of our bodies, not to mention our emotions, on a deeply intimate level. A sexual assault stays with us, much of the time, sometimes for our entire lives — the memory of it can plague our nightmares, can give us post-traumatic responses like hypervigilance, sensitivity to touch or to loud and sudden noises, induce panic disorders, anxiety, trigger issues with our diets and our appetites, vaginismus, psychotic episodes, nightmares and night terrors, insomnia, compulsive vomiting, fainting spells, and all the other after-effects of a traumatic episode, coupled with the fact that everyone around you hates you for it.
People hate rape victims, after all, don’t they?
It’s part of the reason people want to believe it was always a rape victim’s fault — what were they wearing? What were they doing? Were they drunk or high? Why were they alone with that person or people? Why didn’t they call the police? Why didn’t they scream for help? Why didn’t they walk faster so that their rapist would pick a slower target? Did they ask for it? Did they want to be raped?
In a society where sexual violence is viewed by many as a fact of life, the onus for it is naturally placed on the victim, and not on the perpetrator. Innocent until proven guilty. I know him; he’s a sound man, he’d never do that. Women can’t rape people — only men. What about his reputation? What if the victim is lying? And even if the victim isn’t lying… Maybe things just went too far. Maybe the perpetrator was drunk or high — a condemnation for a victim, a defence for a perpetrator. Maybe they misinterpreted things. Maybe it was just a laugh. Boys will be boys. What’s the harm, anyway?
Victim already or not, you end up being very aware of the potential for sexual violence around you — not going alone to certain places, being far more careful of strangers, thinking about escape routes, thinking about how visible you are on cameras, thinking about if strangers would notice you going by, thinking about if strangers would come if you called for help. Are you sympathetic enough — white enough, pretty enough, assertive enough, but not too assertive? Do you appear less disposable in the eyes of a would-be passerby to your assault? And if you’re too disposable to merit a stranger’s concern, or if there are no strangers around, do you have other failsafes in play? Can you improvise a weapon? Can you fight back? Can you dial emergency services in your pocket? Do you know how to get out of a ziptie or a set of handcuffs? Do you never leave your drinks unattended or covered, or carry something to test your drinks for drugs?
The fact that you’re most likely to be sexually victimised by an attacker already known to you — a partner, a friend, a family member, a teacher, or religious leader, or other community member — is a fact, but not one you’re allowed to acknowledge without bringing up some very inconvenient truths of our society.
Joan Lambert — and Ellen Ripley — have presumably lived with this double-think in their heads all their lives, and suddenly, here’s a very direct parallel to it, and it’s real (you know it’s real because everyone’s acknowledging it, even the cis straight men, who are of course, the true arbiters of reality), and it’s coming for you, and you can’t stop it. You can only watch or listen, powerlessly, as it does what it does to someone you know and work with and maybe have some affection for, and know it’s probably coming for you next.
With a thunk, Parker places this on the table:
Dallas’ gun — naturally, a phallic symbol. Quite a big one, too — Parker has to hold it in both hands! And yet, big and powerful as it is, Dallas’ symbolic masculinity is not sufficient to protect him.
In being abducted by the alien, Dallas has disappeared from sight, from our minds, to be taken away and bred full of monstrous progeny offscreen, and in the meantime, he has been emasculated, his metaphorical penis left behind.
“No blood. No Dallas. Nothing.”
The lack of blood is more frightening than the alternative — were there blood and a sign of Dallas’ death, they would know exactly what had happened to him and that his suffering was over. There is no longer amongst the crew a hope for their crewmates’ survival — there is instead a hope for the opposite as understanding of the xenomorph’s purposes for them (and for the remaining crew) sets in.
Tearfully, Lambert insists that they abandon ship and flee — Ripley quietly, calmly points out that all four of them cannot take the shuttle together, and she jumps to drawing straws.
At least if they abandon ship, there’s more of a chance of survival — and in the event that they die, it’s of starvation or oxygen deprivation or some other understandable cause. They won’t die impregnated by the xenomorph and forced to bear her offspring, their bodies taken over and utilised for another’s purpose, and thereby destroyed slowly and agonisingly.
Ripley wants to plan; Parker wants to jump right into action and kill it — her suggestion is they work in pairs, and none of them are ever alone. They cannot then be trapped alone.
And immediately, Parker is gone. He tells Ash not to follow him — he rejects the buddy system as soon as it’s employed. It’s a slight on his masculinity, no? This idea that he should need someone following him around as if he can’t take care of himself? Especially when it’s Ash, who’s a freak, and not particularly masculine himself?
Parker is presented as the angriest and most ready for violence character on the ship, and that’s, of course, not divorced from his Blackness, and the extent to which Blackness — especially Black masculinity — is often associated with rage and brutality, largely due to racialised depictions in media and a lot of racist propaganda. Black people are more likely to be perceived as angry even when they’re not — Black people’s assertiveness, their direct communication, or even just completely neutral statements are interpreted as angry, either with semi- or full intentionality to undercut them, or out of bias and a lack of empathy and compassion for their humanity. I’m not discounting these biases when I look at Parker as the only Black cast member on a majority-white acted and produced film shot by a white director.
But Parker’s anger, much like Lambert’s, is an understandable reaction to his situation. Unlike Lambert, he isn’t someone who’s prone to tears, and he doesn’t cry — his immediate desire is for them to act, and he’s frustrated by their planning.
Why shouldn’t he be? None of their planning or strategy has come from Mother — the “mind” most equipped on the ship to strategise for this situation. None of their other strategising has helped so far — his closest friend on board and his subordinate, Brett; now, their captain is dead, and none of their planning did anything to help against that outcome.
He is understandably suspicious of Ripley wanting to talk strategy out when talking things out hasn’t helped so far — and while there’s no indication of it (who would he indicate it to, when he has one left on board he trusts?), of the crew members, he could easily be the most likely to distrust their employers and to guess at a conspiracy to keep the xenomorph alive for the sake of scientific advancement even before Ash and Mother reveal that those are their guidelines, given that a) of the crew left, he’s potentially the most disposable as the lowest paid aboard, not to mention the only Black member of the crew, and that b) for-profit companies (not to mention the US government) have a long history of viewing Black lives as disposable compared to potential scientific advancements.
And although earlier in the piece I was blithely talking about the extent to which the onus for sexual violence isn’t placed on cisgender straight men, men are potentially victimised by precisely the same system, most often by other men, but also by women. It’s shameful to admit to victimisation by another man because of the perceived emasculation, and impossible to admit to victimisation by women because it simply isn’t viewed by many as possible. The double-edged sword of the expectation placed on Black men — especially Black working men like Parker — of hypermasculinity means that while they might be viewed as intimidating and strong as opponents, they’re afforded less compassion and care and perceived as less in need and deserving of it. Add to that the culture of silence around Black men’s experiences of sexual violence — even as children — and Parker is likely making the exact same connection that Lambert might be.
Ripley is the one repressing most of her emotions and attempting to remain cool and collected — at two apparently different ends of the spectrum in terms of their expression of it, Lambert and Parker are both utterly overwhelmed with fear and dread. Both of them might come off as impulsive, but they’re each exhibiting the same human response to an immediate threat: fight or flight. They both know how this goes — they don’t trust the higher command, whether it’s Ripley, Mother, the company, or anything else, and all they want it out.
I love this look at Ripley’s face after Mother brings up Science Order 937. She already suspected something was up, of course, after her conversation with Dallas and with Ash’s caginess throughout, but here you see the complete certainty and understanding that she was right, and that, to whatever extent, they have been betrayed by the company.
Standard procedure is to do what the Hell they tell you to do.
ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS SECONDARY.
CREW EXPENDABLE.
And, of course, now in the safety of Mother’s control room, we see Ripley break — she rages at Ash and grabs him, throws him back, then bursts into tears. Parker and Lambert are both right, and she needs to contact them instead of Ash because Parker was right — Ash cannot be trusted.
It’s appropriate that although he’s an android, he’s wearing the face of a white man and attempting to ensure the victimisation of the three crew left aboard — a Black man and two white women, one potentially multiply gender marginalised by her openly intersex status. For the sake of company profit and policy, he is willing — eager, even — to uphold a system of indiscriminate violence and rupturing of the crew’s personal autonomies, with the knowledge and understanding that he himself will go untouched by it.
Why would he stand against it, when that’s the case? What has he got to lose by fighting the xenomorph, but profit and power?
In a parallel to Ripley’s suggested attack on the xenomorph, we see Ash close off her escape routes and trap her in the space with him — she cannot run from him, cannot escape, and nor can she hide. And yet even though he’s apparently stronger than her, the method by which he attempts to kill her is brutal.
Look at the strain in Ripley’s throat as he forces the rolled-up newspaper inside her mouth. Look at the background of the shot, where we see pasted-up images of naked or scantily clad women, reduced to sexual objects. Here, Ash creates a phallic tool by which he penetrates Ripley’s mouth and then her throat, stares down at her face so he can see her choke, see her eyes bulge and widen, see the sweat on her face and the tears on her cheeks, hear her gag reflex try to expel the foreign object that is killing her. His two hands are gripping it tightly, holding the shaft of it; Ripley is outstretched and prone, resting on a surface so that she’s at a height with Ash’s crotch, even though he’s using a tool for this violence rather than his literal or actual genitalia. Look at Ash’s expression of fierce concentration and his utter loathing for Ripley beneath him, who he considers to be so inferior to himself, and to the xenomorph — who he considers to be expendable, disposable.
As he approached her with this desire to kill, possibly whilst already beginning to malfunction from the blow to his head when she threw him back against Mother’s console, we see a slow drip of milky-white fluid from the wound in his head:
We saw Ash drinking some earlier — it’s his circulation fluid.
All three crewmembers end up fighting him to get Ash off her, and we see Ash continuing to malfunction — until Parker beheads him, and the crew sees he’s undeniably an android. And yet, in that end of violence and in Parker cutting him off, it almost parallels an orgasm — he chose to kill Ripley in one of the most suggestive and invasive ways possible, and although he’s killed, it’s with an explosion of milky white fluid that spatters everywhere, not only onto himself or the room, but also onto Parker and Ripley.
Even in the last throes of his “death,” he attempts to kill Parker — and once again, we see a penetration where Lambert stabs his flailing and mostly-beheaded corpse in the back.
Here comes the confirmation for the three of them that, all along, Ash has been working in the company’s interests and potentially protecting the xenomorph, no matter the expense of crew life.
Android cum-spattered, and with more of it dripping out of his mouth, we see him reanimated to answer the crew’s questions. He confirms to Parker that their lives aren’t important, and that the only priority is returning the xenomorph to Earth.
ASH: A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
LAMBERT, quietly, face blank: You admire it.
ASH: I admire its purity. A survivor… Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Here the white symbolism stands for more than android cum — as the inhuman face of the company, a for-profit entity that by its definition upholds whatever systems might be most profitable for its shareholders, also upholds the xenomorph’s capacity for indiscriminate violence and domination of its surroundings.
To Ash — and therefore to the company he represents — morality exists only in the form of “delusions.” They are an inconvenient and fantastical idea that serve only to stand in the way of fuller coffers. The xenomorph, with its phallic design, is “structurally perfect”, but note the word he uses.
Its purity.
Purity of purpose — death, destruction, but only because they are necessary to violent reproduction, expansion, and utter domination. The xenomorph is a capitalist at heart, who knew?
Even in his last words before being unplugged, Ash draws on his own sadistic impulses — “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… You have my sympathies,” before he grins; as an android worshipful of the alien-hunting them, they know him to be incapable, or at least, unwilling. It’s just another nasty jab before they die, and he doesn’t get to witness it.
Anyway, you know. Burn it down.
In response to an enemy, they can see rather than a more nebulous and invisible one — notably, an enemy with a face and a particular evil intention — we now see Lambert, Parker, and Ripley finally moving as a trio and showing solidarity with each other. They’re no longer talking over one another as they move through the corridor, but responding to each other’s questions and comments, and moving as a unit.
They’re also calmer now, and again, I would posit that Parker and Lambert are feeling more secure in their fear, not because the xenomorph is no longer dangerous or no longer something to be frightened of, but because they understand far more about why the situation is happening, and they feel they can all trust each other because they were all being victimised by a common enemy.
They split off from each other, and I think it’s notable that although Parker and Lambert don’t survive and are the ones to die here, Ripley was putting herself in the most vulnerable position by telling them to go off together, but going alone to the bridge herself. She’s someone who really does take the chain of command fairly seriously, and part of that for her is in taking the most risk on her shoulders.
She hears Jonesy and realises he’s still alive, and of course, she’s risking herself for him, too, in the two or three minutes she has to spare.
I really like the way that Parker and Lambert move together and the way they’re synchronised — as Lambert does the work, Parker always positions himself at angles with his back to the walls so he has the most visibility possible. I think with his movements (and the way he wears a bandana around his head in the style of a lot of American Vietnam war veterans, bearing in mind this film came out in ’79) that we’re meant to read him as ex-military or otherwise ex-combatant.
Lambert hasn’t been under this sort of strain before. Faced with the xenomorph, she forgets both fight and flight — she freezes in place, sobbing, and can’t bring herself to move, and Parker, unwilling to potentially harm her, doesn’t want to shoot until he’s close enough.
I think they both go out in the ways they were respectively most terrified of, or expecting most apiece.
Parker is trapped with the thing, face to face, blood pouring out of his mouth, choking, until the xenomorph brutally penetrates him with her ovipositor. It’s close, it’s intimate, it’s horrendously violent, and he sees his enemy in the face as she gets the better of him, as she destroys him — at the same time, terrorising Lambert. Parker is not only defeated by the xenomorph as an enemy combatant, but he’s alive long enough to see that he’s also failed to protect Lambert, who he was trying so hard to protect up until his final moments. It’s not just that he’s bested and killed in combat — it’s also the fact that his sacrifice hasn’t saved Lambert, hasn’t saved anybody.
For Lambert, on the other hand, part of her complete and overarching terror of the xenomorph’s approach was that she couldn’t see it coming, was that the xenomorph’s attack represented the unknown. She was in tears as it approached Dallas, and even her desire to flee was about not having to look at it, to face it — she wanted to be running in the other direction.
Here, she freezes, and the xenomorph is then facing Parker as she kills him — but she gets Lambert from behind, by hooking her about the ankle with her tail.
It’s obviously good horror craftsmanship, the idea that both of these people die in the ways that were implied to be most frightening to them, but also, it’s about the inevitability of it, too. Both of them had their own strategies, their own instincts, and both of them were failed by them, even failed by their partnership with others, because the enemy they faced was too great.
Another final tunnel shot after Ripley emerges from one of the ladder ports soaked with sweat, breathing heavily, emergency lighting flashing all around her, and now she gets her first real glimpse of the xenomorph glistening as it lurks in the dark, its teeth on show.
Can it hear her over the noise? Can it sense her, smell her? Is it chasing her now?
She doesn’t know. All she can do is try to hold it together and get her and Jones to safety as fast as she can. And now even Mother has failed her — or perhaps betrayed her for the second time. When she screams “you bitch!” as she runs through the corridor, is she shouting at Mother? At the alien? At God? All of the above?
I think it’s interesting that Mother is mostly voiceless until the time comes for her to herald doom, and then she talks and talks. There’s a parallel to be found in that, too — the way some older figures won’t say a word on the harder subjects, on rape and coercion, on oppression, on institutional violence, except to say that there’s no point in fighting. That the end is already coming, or has come — that resistance is pointless, that what’s happened and what will happen are the same, and equally inevitable.
I love Ripley’s sense of exhausted victory in the end, that she’s made it, that she’s won by killing the xenomorph — “you bitch,” — but I love that it’s then tenderness that she settles into? She reaches for Jones, clutches at him, kisses him, and gives him a cuddle. She makes sure he’s safe and settled in the status chamber before she starts stripping off to get herself in as well.
These moments of peace are agonising, in their way, on the rewatch — it’s the fact that you see her relax so much, so utterly unobserved, the way she tosses her clothes aside, the way she moves. There’s no ticking clock for her anymore, but it’s not exactly typical relaxation at the end of a hard day.
All of her coworkers, several of them her good friends, are dead. The company wanted her dead — or at least, was happy for her to die. What will happen when she gets back to Earth? Will people believe her?
Do they ever?
But for now, the hard part of it is all over. She’s blown up the ship, they’ve immolated Ash — all of it has been burnt down. Surely, if you destroy the infrastructure in which the evil moves and lives and thrives, the evil will be destroyed, too.
She doesn’t expect it to follow her.
The creepy burst of the xenomorph’s hand is a mirror to the chestbursting scenes — and a sort of mirror to the birth aspect to them, too, this being the birth of a new terror. Ripley can hide from it, buried in a crevice, but for how long?
Now we hear not just Ripley’s breathing and the occasional beats and strings from the music as it builds up, but also the background noise of one of the implements ticking — it adds such a sense of urgency to what she’s doing, the seconds dripping away.
Singing to comfort herself, she readies the harpoon gun, and we see the back of the xenomorph’s head silhouetted by the white smoke in the dark and the flashing lights, and we can really see how penile it is, and then we see the airlock open to pin the xenomorph outside and finally catch it in one last blaze of fire from the escape pod’s thrusters. In order to make sure the xenomorph is destroyed, she pins it to the vessel — she keeps it close to try to make sure it’s dead rather than releasing it to potentially survive.
After that shit, it’s no surprise she gets Jones back out of the unit for another cuddle before she finally goes to sleep.
Kane, Lambert, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
There’s such emotion in her voice as she gives the last sign-off, and it’s just… So powerless, so exhausted. And she doesn’t even know how many sequels there are ahead of her!
It’s such a heavy movie and one that resonates so much — I think even without noting the parallels to themes of sexual violence, it’s so strikingly terrifying, and it’s no wonder the film is still so widely watched and holds up so well despite its age.
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