The 1979 film Alien was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. A brilliant science-fiction horror film, it was met by immediate and widespread critical acclaim. Scott set out simply to film a creative horror movie set in space. However, due to the film’s inspired casting, direction, writing, cinematography, set and creature design, he – entirely by accident – also made a film filled with effective metaphors for sexual assault, anxiety, and violation of the body. In Alien we see a film that proves that with the right combination of talent, unintentional genius can be achieved.
The set and creature designer for the film was the legendary artist H.R. Giger, and Scott’s film would not be what it is without Giger’s work. Known for his sexualized artwork, it should come as no surprise that his creature designs were sexual as well. Much has been made by Scott and various film scholars that there was never any intended theme or metaphor, but the moment H.R. Giger was hired to design a monster, metaphors about sexual violence became unavoidable. The titular alien of the film is a creative work of nightmares that is also a walking rape metaphor. In all of its forms, from face hugger to chest burster to the final monstrosity, the alien’s design is comprised of violent sexual imagery. In its face hugger form, the alien attacks its victims and forces a phallic tube down their throat. As a full-grown adult, the alien is a dark, towering, and terrifying figure. Despite having no eyes, it can find you in the dark. Its large, phallic mouth is home to a smaller, just-as-phallic mouth. It comes across almost like what a child would imagine a rape monster to be.
If Giger’s designs for the alien were aggressively phallic and masculine, his design for the ship, Nostromo, run by a system called Mother, was designed to evoke the feminine, a choice which the script itself echoed. The film features two major “birth” scenes, both of which take place within the Nostromo. The first occurs when the ship’s crew wakes up. On the outset, this appears to be a clean, safe birth: everyone gently rising, one by one, out of their yonic-shaped sleeping pods. However, this is really the film’s first example of bodily violation; it is revealed later on that the crew has been woken up early, forced to leave their metaphorical wombs before it was safe. “Mother” has violated their trust. The second birth scene is unclean in a more literal sense, resulting from the film’s second and far more blatant bodily violation, Kane being forcibly impregnated by the face hugger. This culminates in arguably the most disturbing and famous scene in the film, the chest-bursting birth of the alien. Kane’s violent assault results in a violent, deadly birth. Scott and O’Bannon may not have intended the allegories about rape and its repercussions while making the film, but they are clearly and inescapably there.
Once the alien is born, the film becomes a study in anxiety and violation. More and more things are revealed as dangerous to the crew. Nobody feels safe and everybody is afraid, though each expresses that fear uniquely. Dallas is primarily concerned with the safety of his crew, Ripley tries to figure out what’s going on, Brett and Parker lash out in anger, and Lambert can’t seem to stop alternating between screaming and crying. These are all common reactions to trauma, but most relevantly they are incredibly common coping mechanisms to sexual assault and similar violations. Trust and security break down even more upon the revelation that Ash, the newest crew member, is really an android sent by “The Company” to ensure the procurement of the alien, having been directly instructed by The Company to make it priority one, over the “expendable” lives of the crew. This devaluation of assault victims is exhibited in real life all the time – for example, the shareholders in the Weinstein company knew about his abuse of actresses for decades before forcing him out in the face of public pressure.
With the alien loose and all the crew’s perceived safety nets proven treacherous, their ship, their home, their Mother, is no longer safe. The alien stalks the halls of the ship, picking off each member of the crew one by one. They cannot even trust themselves, fearing their own bodies, their own skin. What terrifies the characters in the film seemingly more than death is becoming another host, a yet further violation and a betrayal by their own bodies. The “womb” has been violated and they can never feel safe again.
A rarely noted comparison made to Alien, though an apt one, is to John Carpenter’s Halloween which came out the year before. Alien is at its core a horror film, having come out right at the onset of the ’70s-’80s slasher trend that introduced inhuman, seemingly unkillable monsters that stalked their victims with phallic weapons, often through difficult-to-escape, enclosed spaces. The alien itself is distinct from the likes of slashers like Michael Myers only in that it is not human-shaped. Instead of a phallic butcher’s knife, the alien has a phallic body. This comparison seems appropriate because no genre can accurately or effectively portray themes like anxiety, sexual assault, and bodily violation better than horror films, especially the slasher sub-genre. The core motivating fear in both Alien and Halloween is death, but even deeper than that is the fear of violation – of yourself, your space, and your body.
All these elements of the film are interesting on their own, but Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ellen Ripley ties them all together. Slasher films are noted for featuring lone female survivors, coined the “final girl” or the “female victim-hero” by Carol Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, and Ellen Ripley certainly fits the “final girl” mold as a masculine-coded female character who survives the stalking killer. Most people even passingly familiar with the production of Alien have heard that Ripley was written as a man in the initial script. This is something of a misnomer, as the casting department actively auditioned men and women for almost all of the parts, but the point still stands that Ripley was not written with a woman in mind. Because the writing did not include typical Hollywood tropes for female characters, Ripley has been heralded as a gold standard of characterization, and by many as a feminist icon. However, Alien truly is the masterpiece that it is because its protagonist is a woman, masculine-coded or not. That simple casting choice brings all the other aspects of the film that create its themes into sharp and clear focus. While sexual assault is by no means unique to women, the trauma of pregnancy and a violent forced birth is visually coded to cisgendered women. Having a woman at the forefront of the story makes the anxiety of giving birth to an unwanted monster all the more real.
Sometimes the best things happen by accident. Ridley Scott may not have set out to make a landmark feminist horror tentpole with resonating and effective metaphors for sexual assault and violation of the body, but that is exactly the movie he made. Alien was made and released in a perfect storm of creative input amidst the burgeoning era of horror cinema. To this day, it remains a terrifying classic.
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