When you read my blog, no one can hear you scream, Part I

August 15, 2005 – 9:12 pm   |   Chicken Scratch

Some of you who read my blog (all five of you, whom I love dearly) may know a little bit about my fascination with the film Alien. I like the entire series of films, but Alien will always be my favorite of the four for one particular reason: despite the fact that the film is fiction, what makes it a scary film is something all-too real: sex

Not just sex, but sexual crime. Most people think of Alien as just a sci-fi horror flick, but few people stop to realize that the film’s horror stems from a vulnerability to which women are always exposed: the threat of being penetrated by force. If that weren’t frightening enough, director Ridley Scott understood well that to make his film even more terrifying, its predator needed to understand the nature of its power.

Almost immediately, Scott establishes a contrast between the sexual world of the Nostromo, a cargo ship carrying a crew of seven people, and the alien craft that lands on a planet called LV486. Inside the Nostromo is an industrial world of cold steel and sharp, square edges. In a mock birth scene, the crew awakes peacefully from sleep, clothed in diaper-like underwear, rising from their pods, like bassinets, into a white, sterile room—the ship’s womb. Not ironically, the crew refers to the ship’s computer as “mother.” Mother, of course, is asexual; her only purpose is to serve as a caretaker, and she is rigid and determined in her objective.

By contrast, the environment in which the three Nostromo crew members—Dallas, Kane and Lambert—discover an alien life form is organic and alive, fused together by large skeletal structures that are covered in a mucus-like coating. The womb of this ship, into which Kane descends, is hot, humid and dark, and despite Lambert’s pleas so return to the Nostromo, Kane shows a single-minded determination to “go on. We must go on” and explore the interior of the ship. As if in a Freudian nightmare, Kane descends into the belly of the beast and ultimately discovers the womb of the ship, where he sees rows and rows of egg-like pods. When Kane gets to close to one of these pods, it literally hatches, and out springs an alien organism that burns through Kane’s helmet, attaches to his face and inserts a tube down his throat and into his stomach. Kane is, in other words, penetrated by force—raped.

And that concludes part one of this muti-part series on Alien. Stay tuned for more to come!