Ridley Scott’s sci-fi/horror classic Alien leads off this media analysis blog with underlying themes of aggression and sex that are common favorites among American filmmakers. Many viewers have enjoyed the treat of this tense and excellently paced slasher. Alien’s critical and public success lies in the pairing of striking visuals with an intentionally claustrophobic environment, a recipe that has been repeated numerous times since. Further examination reveals that the movie also speaks to the nature of man as a primitive being, where reproduction is a violent and traumatic experience.
Like many of Scott’s films, Alien leads it’s viewer to hidden themes by offering up several obvious visual hints throughout. Most notable is the depiction of the foreign lifeforms discovered by the crew as eerily similar to female and male genitals. The “facehugger” that attacks Cain, for example, closely resembles a vagina when it is inspected by the team. Once the alien is born and matured its primary head is phallic in shape. Furthermore, when it is threatening or about to kill one of the crew members it repeatedly extends an additional organ from the mouth. This is similar to the human erect penis. Ridley Scott’s use of obvious queues leading the viewer to more subtle themes is seen in his follow-up to Alien, the film Prometheus (2012). As the movie opens we are witness to an engineer who appears to give birth to a DNA strand that will populate a planet, leading us to believe that this event we have just seen has taken place in another time from the rest of the story. The deeper narrative of time travel is then left to the critical viewer to discover.
The notion that the alien is mimicking arousal when attacking its victims is in keeping with the pairing of sex and violence present throughout the movie. After laying waste to the crew the creature relentlessly hunts the protagonist, Ripley. Though early drafts of the script depict Ripley as a male actor, Ridley Scott intentionally changed the gender and cast Sigourney Weaver so as to reinforce the narrative of reproductive relations. We see the sexual connection to violence at several intervals in the movie. There is a rather unsettling incident where the cyborg Ash attempts to kill Ripley by rolling up a pornographic magazine and jamming it end down over her mouth as she lies unconscious. Later in the film when the alien kills Lambert we the viewer see only its long tail move up between her legs. Needless to say these are some of the less subtle hints at Scott’s underlying narrative.
Symbolism of the womb and giving birth is similarly present in the film Alien. Again, Ridley Scott uses obvious events and imagery, such as the eggs aboard the engineer’s ship that spawn the facehuggers or the alien exploding from Cain’s stomach, in order to lead the viewer toward deeper interpretation. Early in the film Dallas accesses the ship’s artificial intelligence hub and learns of the distress signal. Note the room the artificial intelligence is housed in: Unlike the rest of the vessel it is circular, comfortable and filled with a warm light. The artificial intelligence core serves as symbolic imagery for the womb. The AI itself is appropriately named Mother.
Lost Narratives 