In another triumphant effort from the Prince Charles Cinema, I was recently afforded the opportunity to see Aliens on the big screen.
This was the first 18 film I ever saw, at just nine of ten years of age. I still distinctly remember watching it with my brother and two friends on New Years Eve. It scared the bejeezus out of me, but also thrilled my innocent mind. Turns out it still has all the power it did then, as my girlfriend’s fingers found out to their cost when they got somewhat crushed in the scene where Ripley and Newt are trapped in a room with two Facehuggers.
What interested me most about this revisiting of an old friend of a movie, however, was not so much to do with the incredible 80s dialogue which I have always loved,
nor was it the incredible vision of HR Giger which created the blueprint for this, the most evil and awful of film monsters,
Rather, it was to the film’s presentations of maternity that I found myself really drawn, and with which I’m going to feebly and ironically grapple, even against all my better judgement.
In Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she waffles on about the inherently voyeuristic and scopophilic (pleasure as looking at another person as an erotic object) act of watching movies, positing the females’ To-Be-Looked-At-Ness (TBLATN) above and beyond her purpose in the film: the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning as she puts it . The essay has been immensely influential and continues to shape feminist critiques of cinema, but has nothing really to do with my point… apart from this.
She says in her conclusion that: “the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish.”
Rather, in Aliens, the diegesis is broken by the profusion of aliens, and the fact that it is science fiction, and the real and present danger is quite the opposite of castration, as the disconcertingly vaginal protrusion that is one’s belly button promises to have an angry snapping little fella bursting through it: an intrusive, yes, but neither static nor dimensional little fetish if you want to call it that.
Red Dwarf's Polymorph
What’s more, the female’s TBLAN (to-be-looked-at-ness) is ruined, here, by a Jewish/latina butch commando with a gun fetish of her own, a permed, androgynous and, in my girlfriend’s words, saggy-breasted hero, and the queen alien herself, in all her beauty.
As such, my interest lies in the fact that the film’s main and final face off is between these two un-feminised, un-“womanly”, un-“beautiful” “women”, neither simply maternal nor clumsily feminine. Their primary battle is based on fighting for, and protecting their young even if it means ripping the face off another girl. The ultimate bitch fight.
What might otherwise be a fight between good and evil, then, becomes rather a fight for the protection of their (surrogate) offspring, and the righteousness of Ripley’s protection becomes somehow less right, even if the nasty little xenomorphs do have acid for blood and prey on humans to further their species.
And where these main female parts portray strong and scary anti-stereotypes, the males are simple henchmen – both human and alien – stupid, if occasionally funny, and pretty much killed off in order of their crapness. Even Bill Paxton’s excellent turn as Private Hudson is intended as light relief amongst the central and importantly maternal conflict. Weaver’s spirited portrayal of a woman is both strong and weak, both brave and fearful, both maternal and fraternal, and of course displaying all the inevitable shades of grey therein.
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The queen alien also reminded me of Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture Maman, of which she has created multiple versions in the last 15 years or so.
Louise Bourgeous, Maman 1999
Bourgeois has also spoken of the similarity between her mother and the spider. Both were weavers (not Sigourney Weaver’s though), and both are protective and helpful (in that the spider kills mosquitoes). Indeed, the carnivorous diet of the spider is not only protectionist, but also provides food for her spawn. Similarly, the Alien’s cocooning of humans to lay eggs in their mouths which will hatch more Aliens through the host’s stomach is simply a method of procreation. Their evilness comes in their other-ness, and, again, the fact that they have acid for blood and are ugly mother-s.
The maternal elements in Bourgeois’ works are, I think, enhanced alongside the presentations of maternity in Aliens discussed above, and vice-versa for the art-historically-inclined doubter who refuses to believe in the excellence of Aliens.
Where maternal doesn’t stand for simply womanly, or nurturing, or feminine, or ladylike, it might come to mean an overcoming of “lack”, and a very simple appreciation of the other.
Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1997
ALMF 
