Gender Trouble in “Aliens”

Aliens (1986) presents visions of femaleness, and specifically motherhood, in multifarious terms that alternatively reinforce biological understandings of these concepts and hint at, but never truly fulfill their semiotic undoing. The film plays with notions of gender in its explorations of submission and spatiality, thus thrusting its unsettling images and themes back onto the viewer in a visceral manner and failing to deconstruct traditional signs of gender. The film’s inconclusive and often muddled management of gender makes it more like a Freudian fever dream than a definitive dismantling of the mores that define horror’s regressive politics in postmodernity. (See Modleski, 1986)

            Ellen Ripley’s distinctive look and demeanor are not merely androgynous, but agender; her efforts to survive transcend social expectations of how she should carry out her work, and this is reflected in her stark and simple visual presentation. Similarly, among the few women in the military outfit are butch and androgynous figures like Vasquez, whose macho posturing at once threatens and impresses her male peers. Vasquez is Ripley’s foil, stripped of the latter’s maternality (which therein confers onto her the possibilities of nurture and care which are themselves alien to a militaristic milieu). Therefore, Vasquez and Ripley are only subversive figures as long as they engage in male-coded drag. Their otherness (that is, their shades of maleness) is powerful insofar as it is not classically female or feminine; they are the butch mirrors of Reagan-era Rambos rather than existing outside the bounds of gender as binaristically understood.

            Indeed, Ripley’s status as female only begs articulation in expository moments of the power differential between her brand of heroism and the ineffectuality of the men around her—be they meathead grunts or suited corporate types. Men only function to doubt Ripley’s resolve or present barriers that often lead to disaster or further trauma that Ripley herself must experience. In the world of Aliens, men are only indispensable in that they resist Ripley’s own goals. These objectives are not coded as ostensibly female; they are instinctual and survivalist, and yet they are necessarily governed by the aesthetic and narrative logics of a sci-fi action thriller. Further still, to Burke, Ripley is merely “kiddo”; to a bureaucratic board of Weyland-Yutani, she is a manic mess not to be believed. (7:18; 10:49 - 15:11) In this sense, Ripley is only female—that is, not-male—insofar as the film must continue along its generic and aesthetic course.

            Male onslaught hardly ends in the boardroom. The aliens’ phallic shape only further reinforces the film’s subtextual presentation of the male as the vile Other, wherein the intrusiveness of the phallus represents a violation of the pure and good. Yet the male-coded wrath here does not discriminate across genders. The face-huggers, in their unique design that melds both yonic and phallic imagery, present a threat, particularly to the men of the outfit; Burke is taunted for finding “love at first sight” with one of them in the lab. (55:45) Furthermore, the film sets up the homosocial world of the Marine grunts as having its inherent dangers. In particular, Hudson’s swagger serves as the epitome of masculinist ego. He describes his arsenal of weapons, with which he and others will “protect” Ripley, with lusty fervor. (43:41) The arrogance of Hudson’s toxic masculinity foretells his outfit’s failure to eradicate the alien race with their phallic weaponry. Yet some phalluses on display in the film are also presented as the agents of salvation. In particular, the pseudo-“lovemaking” scene between Ripley and Hicks unsubtly portrays a healthier vision of masculinist confidence that is also symbolically generative—the “right” kind of violence, or perhaps mode of reproduction. Hicks “introduces” Ripley his impressive gun, “a personal friend” of his; he teaches her the intricacies of the weapon as she looks on and learns in fascination. (1:43:55) Paradigmatically, this sequence stands in lieu of an actual consummation—once again, the stakes of the plot act out the film’s sexualized impulse to subordinate Ripley and put her in yet another corner, especially in a moment where her female desire confers onto her a sexist sort of vulnerability.

            If Aliens presents Ripley’s brand of gender-bending heroism as the salve to the feminized men who cannot successfully protect themselves from harm, then the film’s moral-aesthetic project only serves to uphold a negatively coded conception of the feminine. This follows along Modleski’s observations that the violation of men in horror can still possess “feminine imagery” and “feminine positioning,” thereby denigrating the female—and the female viewer—in its treatment of violation as both terrifying and pleasurable. (292) Yet in the rare moments when Ripley does not face gender-based oppression, her androgyny still does not preclude her maternal instincts and success at nurturing Newt. Only she can coax the little girl into speaking, and her calm but firm attempts to clean her dirty face are almost resigned and blasé; she says straightforwardly, “It’s hard to believe there’s a little girl under all of this” with a flat affect that at once reflects her composure and her acceptance that she must—on top of everything!—play the role of Mother. (1:01:32) 

            Ripley’s status as a gender-cipher, even more so than the tough-as-nails Vasquez or the feminized Burke, is radical on its own. Yet the film’s parallel treatment of alien and human reproduction once again serves to articulate the salvific properties of Ripley’s femaleness. Newt’s bedside discussion of childbirth with Ripley—where she also voices fears over her dreams—immediately evokes Ripley’s nightmares, where she “delivers” the alien children embedded in her. In terms of the film’s narrative logic, this moment of pseudo-domestic bonding, which seeks to soothe both parties’ bedtime terrors, is almost inevitable: it at once offers a glimpse into the mother Ripley could have been for Amanda and articulates the stakes of the two characters’ survival. Yet the dialogue here also blatantly deflates the symbolic mystique of the aliens themselves. “Isn’t that how babies come? I mean, people babies?” Newt asks, speaking of the chest-bursters. (1:32:50) Discussion of Ripley’s deceased daughter follows. This moment of on-the-nose thematic exposition thus literalizes the sexual and maternal politics that the film had navigated in its subtext at the same moment it conforms to a sentimental narrative logic. Thus, the scene plays out an uneasy duality between potentially subversive reflexivity and a conservative vision of mother-child dynamics. At the same time that Newt accurately points out the film’s obsession with biological motherhood and sexualized imagery, she and Ripley share a moment of familiarity that smacks of military-family mutual reassurance. Perhaps this tonal awkwardness lends itself well to a more fundamental admission on the filmmakers’ behalf: Newt and Ripley share an understanding that is both coded as female and familial; this symbiosis is special because it exists outside of the worlds of warlike terror and, more importantly, encroaching men.

            The film presents Ripley as only ever a mother: her loss of Amanda, on a fundamental level, motivates her resolve to destroy the alien creatures. Aliens thus explicitly, and often effectively, depicts Ripley’s heroism as a stellar performance of post-partum revenge fantasy. The aliens are thus the symbols of the absent father—a gap Hicks will surely fill himself—who in return represents a threat to the social order and the “proper” family in his violation of the female; he is the impregnator of nightmares, not just throats and stomachs, and the root of Ripley’s maternal anguish. Yet the most aggressive alien of all is none other than the queen, who is at the center of a sinister fallopian network. The film does little to suggest that Ripley immediately identifies with this other mother, but it does present the reversal of the tender motherhood that Ripley herself wishes she could have embodied for Amanda: the queen’s egg-laying farm is parasitic, encroaching, unfeeling...it is also what Burke wanted for Ripley and Newt.

            The film’s treatment of spatiality and navigation illustrates how engagement in ostensibly female ways of knowing has its subversive potential. Newt is a master navigatrix of a birth canal-esque system of tubes and vents under the surfaces of everywhere she goes. These labyrinths are the visual counterpoints to Ripley’s forced entry into symbolic corners. The rigidity of spatiality and its relationship to male oppression is outdone by the organicity of the complex and interpenetrating system of vents and entrances. Indeed, the aliens themselves can only come through certain orifices and canals; their and the soldiers’ understanding of space is rational. Newt, Ripley, and the surviving members of the initial onslaught thus begin to understand how the more subversive routing through the ship—along a map as large as the space itself—confounds spatiality and scale in a way that symbolically avoids the determinism of unidirectional penetration. This is the film’s most progressive element: in counterpoint to both the male terror the aliens present and the vile, unnatural, manufactured treatment of motherhood the queen emblematizes, women can ultimately evade penetration-destruction through an intimate knowledge of the organ systems—the spaces among space—in which they are inevitably enmeshed.

            Despite its seemingly progressive presentations of gender, though, Aliens ultimately sets forth a more conservative vision. In amalgamating Ripley’s sometime-motherhood with her sometime-femaleness, and consigning its male characters to the invasive horrors of sexualized penetration, the film presents a denigration of the female (that is, the stereotypical cultural signs with which femaleness is most often associated) in its thematic and symbolic preoccupation with the consequences of submission. But as an unwilling victim to Burke’s sexualized coercion, male-dominated bureaucracy, and militaristic machismo, Ripley must constantly outdo her femaleness in an agender display of faux-progressive badassery. Such is the aesthetic project of the film, but this also complicates the film’s treatment of motherhood, especially considering its emphasis on the maternal as necessarily female. In championing the restoration of the nuclear family (pseudo-mother, -father, and -daughter prevail at the film’s end), the film outdoes its provocative potential in presenting Ripley as a mother by virtue of her biological and social imperative to perform in such a role. Only she can play the role of Mother, only because she only ever was Mother, and only because the film demands that Mother be backed into countless physical and symbolic corners before the contractions and carnage commence.

Citations 

Cameron, J. (1986). Aliens. United States: 20th Century Fox. Film.

Modleski, T. (1986). The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory, in Gelder, K. (ed.) The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.