Reproduction and the Maternal Body in the Alien series

Chapter One: Alien

She is there in the text’s various representations of the primal scene, and in its depiction of birth and death. She is there in the film’s images of blood, darkness and death. She is also there in the chameleon figure of the alien, the monster as fetish-object of and for the archaic mother.

– Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine

It is significant that the Soviets sent an untrained woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit on June 16th, 1963 as a symbolic “defacing of the images of male astronauts”. The technology of orbital flight was coded as an aggressive, penetrating, phallic force, one of the ‘extensions of man’ in the truest sense.

– Daniel Pimley, Representations of the Body in Alien

Alien, directed by Ridley Scott and released in the summer of 1979, is a film that can be analysed in two differing ways in identifying anxieties relating to the human body. The first anxiety is related specifically to the biological functions of male and female intercourse, and, subsequently, natural birth. Birth and reproduction are presented in Alien as dangerous and monstrous, and the female body is represented as a space of aggression and hostility within the film’s mise-en-scène. Sexual symbolism is offered in the manifestation of the alien, from its abject birth to its razor-sharp inner jaws and phallic-shaped head. Rape, the hostile womb and the marriage of birth and death all form a part of the metanarrative. However, underlying this narrative is a second anxiety relating to the human body, that reflecting medical and scientific advancements contemporary to the late 1970s. This chapter will examine the anxieties prevalent in Alien, firstly focusing on the concerns of childbirth and the monstrous representation of the maternal body that provide a staple for the subsequent sequels, and secondly on the unease of medical developments at the time of the film’s release, as highlighted in Daniel Pimley’s paper Representations of the Body in Alien, which exemplifies attitudes towards human biology in the late 1970s.

As the opening credits draw to a close, and the organic, chilling musical score is reduced to a few single notes, the spectator is offered a wide view of deep space, and within it, the Nostromo, silently drifting through the stars on a return journey to Earth following a mining expedition on a faraway planet. On board sleep seven crewmembers, five male and two female, along with a cat named Jonesy. By the end of the film, only one crewmember will survive, the woman known as Ripley. Already determined just ten years prior to the release of Alien was the second wave of feminism, which one could argue is a key factor in the presence of Ripley as female hero and sole survivor. The presence of a female protagonist, however, was not a novel one. In the late 1970s, television shows such as Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman all featured female leads, along with a handful of significant science fiction films. Film theorists and authors Ximena Gallardo-C and C. Jason Smith argue that the female protagonist was quickly becoming an established figure in the narrative of science fiction, and state that

Alien was not the first science-fiction film to feature a serious, strong female protagonist: the studio’s decision to cast Sigourney Weaver in the role of Ripley was probably based on the success of female leads such as Katherine Ross in The Stepford Wives (1975), Julie Christie in Demon Seed (1977), and Genevieve Bujold in Coma (1978). In the end, however, every single one of these women either relied on a man or was finally crushed by the evil forces plotting against her.

(Gallardo-C and Smith, 2004: 17)

Following the death of the male captain, Ripley soon takes charge and becomes an independent force on board the ship. The presence of Ripley helps to establish the dominant authority of the female body in Alien. The maternal body, the womb, and the female reproductive system all underline specific aspects of the story arc, and, as argued by Vivian Sobchack, “The narrative enterprise of space exploration and its accompanying visuals may be viewed as a symbolic representation of birth and/or intercourse” (1985: 110). As the Nostromo approaches the planet in Alien, an exterior shot shows the ship’s approach, giving implications of a sexual disposition, a sperm penetrating an egg in the vast, empty womb of outer space, much like the image of Darth Vader’s ship approaching the Death Star in Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977).

Dominated by a grand narrative encompassing themes of reproduction, the representation of birth and the maternal body, both human and alien, is presented within the mise-en-scène with overt visceral quality, which associates the monstrous and the abject to anxieties of childbirth. James Kavanagh argues that there are three scenes of birth within the narrative during the first act of the film, each one progressively more monstrous and violent, leading up to the horrific birth of the alien. The first is presented in the opening scene, in which the astronauts are woken from hyper-sleep. As the camera explores the innards of the Nostromo, a series of tracking shots travel down the empty, lifeless corridors of the ship. Kavanagh argues that the shots implicate “the viewer as I/eye” (1980: 75), suggesting that the spectator is actually witness to a subjective view of the ship’s life-support system, known to the crew as ‘Mother’. Kavanagh continues his argument by stating that, “this ends with a long tracking shot down the smooth, clean electronic corridor into the inner chamber, where six curiously unsexed bodies slowly come to life” (1980: 75). One could argue that the scene alludes to female reproductive organs. The long, red and silver walled corridors present the image of the fallopian tubes, while the brightly lit chamber in which the crew find themselves awakening arguably represents the womb, a sterile place of birth from which the crew are effectively ‘re-born’. As they slowly stir and become conscious, they are presented as un-gendered, their uniform of white underwear giving little suggestion as to who is male and who is female. Instead, the ship itself, which here represents the maternal body, dominates gender and sexuality.

The second birthing scenario takes place aboard the derelict alien craft. Upon settling down on the planetoid (as per company orders) they discover they are within walking distance of the source of origin of what appears to be a distress signal from an, as of yet, unidentified organism. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) and crewmembers Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) and Kane (John Hurt) don spacesuits and venture out onto the planet’s surface to track down the source of the transmission. The planet’s surface is dark, hostile and rocky, howling winds envelope the apprehensive crewmembers as they embark on their short journey, a representation of the hostile womb. En route, however, Ripley discovers that the signal is actually a warning, albeit too late. The three astronauts discover an abandoned alien craft, horseshoe shaped in design, something not of human origin, but one with overt sexual symbolism.

The second birth scene – more a conception – involves two men and a woman collectively imaged as three clumsy sperm-like figures entering the vaginal opening between the upstretched ‘legs’ of an alien spaceship. Entering a corridor that exudes the ooze of biology, they establish an effective visual trope: the confusion of organic and mechanical textures, which gives the alien his camouflage.

(Kavanagh, 1980: 75)

Once inside, the crew travel down empty corridors towards what is suggested to be the ship’s cockpit, containing the dead remains of an alien life form, described by Kavanagh as “death gigantic” (1980: 75). A wide shot reveals the entirety of the room, the three astronauts dwarfed by the gigantic alien and its chair. A close-up of the alien’s chest reveals something has ruptured from within it, its bones protrude outward, the breached body representing the abject, unifying death and birth. Below the cockpit, Kane discovers a hole in the floor leading to another room. As Dallas and Lambert lower him down into the wide space, he describes the room as being “like the god damn tropics” (Alien), suggesting a humid environment, a potentially suitable space in which to breed life. It is here he finds hundreds of eggs, and upon investigating them, the spectator is provided with a subjective shot, a close-up showing that the eggs have an opening on the top that resembles female genitals, similar to the entrance to the ship through which the “sperm-like” astronauts entered, only this time tightly closed. Another close-up shows the vagina-shaped lips open in a strange, mechanical movement, revealing soft, fleshy tissue. From inside, a creature ejects from the egg in one violent, swift movement and attaches itself onto Kane’s face. It is a scene of monstrous birth and violent abjection, a precursor to the one that follows.

The third scene in the first act involves the crew eating around the dining table, their last meal before returning to the hyper-sleep chambers and embarking on their return flight to Earth. Now free of the alien rapist, Kane seemingly begins to choke on his food, and in a chaotic scene, the alien erupts from his chest, blood surging over the crewmembers, which Kavanagh describes as follows:

Finally, the particularly horrifying confusion of the sexual-gynaecological with the gastrointestinal is patched onto life-death, male-female confusions as Kane dies in agony enduring the forced ‘birth’ of the razor-toothed phallic monster that gnaws its way through the stomach into the light – a kind of science fiction phallus dentatus.

(Kavanagh, 1980: 75)

The sequence of scenes allude to the anxiety of male rape and childbirth, as the creature that attached itself to Kane’s face has planted an egg inside him, emphasizing unease surrounding forced penetration.

The representation of abject birth, however, is not confined to that of the human body. What one could arguably describe as a penultimate scene of abjection occurs when Ripley escapes the mother ship in the escape shuttle, which resides on the underbelly of the Nostromo. Additionally, following Kane’s death, the crew watch as the Nostromo jettisons his body into space, a funeral that depicts the corrupt body of the dead crewman as banished from the ship in an endeavour the cleanse the body of the infected.

While the visual elements of reproduction are evident in the depiction of grotesque birth, the metaphor of the archaic mother is also predominant in relation to the alien lifecycle. Creed argues that, “Although the archaic mother as a visible figure does not appear in Alien, her presence forms a vast backdrop for the enactment of all the events” (1993, 20). She continues by arguing that

She is there in the images of birth, the representations of the primal scene, the womb-like imagery, the long winding tunnels leading to inner chambers, the rows of hatching eggs, the body of the mother-ship, the voice of the life-support system, the birth of the alien. She is the generative mother, the pre-phallic mother, the being who exists prior to knowledge of the phallus.

(Creed, 1993: 20)

The metaphor of the archaic mother is bought to fruition in the lifecycle of the alien. Film theorist Daniel Dervin argues that the reproductive mode of the alien could be modelled on the insect world, where a spider would use a wasp’s body as a host to lay its eggs. He uses this analogy to argue that, “The appalling emergence of ‘the little bastard’ alien from the spaceman’s ruptured chest-cavity may well push male birth fantasies to their ultimate absurdity” (Dervin, 1980: 101). This argument further supports man’s anxiety surrounding the pain of childbirth, as well as that of castration. As Judith Newton argues,

The alien, which is fond of womb-like and vaginal-like spaces, is distinctly phallic, and it attacks Ripley, like a fantasy rapist, while she is undressing. But the alien is also equipped with a rather impressive set of vaginal teeth. It is born of eggs, and it continually gives birth to itself, once in a gory evocation of childbirth at the dining room table. In this respect, the alien is a potent expression of male terror at female sexuality and at castrating females in general.

(Newton, 1980: 85)

While the phallic and grotesque imagery of Alien sets up the horror that is emphasized throughout the series, what is unique to each film is the anxiety of biological placement and contemporary issues that relate to the narrative of each instalment. Emerging medical technologies including advancements in surgery could arguably have influenced the Alien’s narrative. Surrogacy made a significant step forward in 1978 when the first IVF baby was born (Information on Surrogacy), a theme that would significantly feature in the film’s sequel, Aliens. Theorist Daniel Pimley argues:

Surgical advances such as hip replacements, organ transplants, pacemakers, heart surgery and the first heart transplant (1967) showed that the ‘components’ of the body could be repaired, replaced or augmented, the application of human in vitro fertilization (1978) was demystifying and mechanizing the reproductive process, while the science of genetic engineering promised that one day it would be capable of building better humans.

(Pimley, 2003: 10)

Pimley’s argument suggests that Alien acts as a response towards concern relating to emerging technological advancements surrounding the opening of the body as well as developments in robotics and prosthetics. Science officer Ash, who is revealed in the third act of the film to be an android, could arguably be seen as the embodiment of this anxiety. A man-made construct of synthetic life, Ash is revealed to have been sent by the Company (Weyland-Yutani) and is working in coalition with the ship’s computer Mother, with the sole purpose of bringing back the alien specimen, if necessary, at the expense of the crew, who are deemed “expendable” (Alien).

Robots have been a staple feature in science fiction film as far back as Metropolis and the films of the silent era. Alongside these reoccurring characters, attitudes relating to contemporary concern have also been prevalent in science fiction cinema. As Pimley argues,

As is so often true in science fiction, Alien is not just about a time and a place in the future, but about the world we live in today. In looking to the future, science fiction amplifies contemporary attitudes and anxieties, often trapping in amber the social conscious and the technological zeitgeist in the process. Just as the atomic monsters of 1950s creature features reflected and fed off atomic-age anxiety, so Alien acts simultaneously as cautionary science fiction and exploitative horror, expressing the feelings of people not in the distant future, but in 1979.

(Pimley, 2003: 4)

Collectively, Ash, Mother and the alien represent the personification of birth in the absence of sexual intercourse. While intercourse is represented within the mise-en-scène as metaphor, and is expressed in the rape of crewmember Kane, the implication of it being a physical sexual act is redundant. Instead, sexual imagery is specific to the manifestation of the alien in its physical appearance. From the vagina-like opening of the craft and the egg, to the phallus dentata of the alien’s inner mouth and phallic shaped head, the alien represents all things perversely sexed, a tool to help emphasize the concern of sexual contact with the Other, and heighten the horror of birth related pain and death. As Pimley argues, “This Alien invader did not want to enslave you or eat you or invade your home world, it wanted to rape you, it wanted to invade your body with its own, always killing by an act of violent penetration in an amplified and nightmarish fusion of sex and death” (2003: 14). The archetypal monster movie would present creatures killing for the sake of survival and nourishment, however Alien presents its monster as representative of death, birth, the corrupt and open body, and the contemporary issues surrounding medical progression that would delineate the narrative of its subsequent sequels.

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