So I was up at an ungodly hour the other night trying to keep the cat and dog apart and decided to entertain myself with a bit of a doodle (that sentence was not intended as a double-entendre). I finished it last night, and I must say, I’m pretty happy with it, apart from the head, which is far too small
So last week we took a look at how the aliens in the eponymous movie quadrilogy are, above all, good ol’ fashioned disturbing because of the confused sexual imagery that surrounds and forms them.
This week we’ll be looking at how the movies subvert our expectations of reproduction (which I did touch on in the last post) and maternity.
If you don’t actually know how the aliens reproduce, allow me to elucidate you. The aliens begin their life as an egg, layed by the queen of their hive/brood/I-can’t-remember-what-it’s-called. When they hatch, they are a small-ish, almost reptillian creature with a body reminiscent of a horseshoe crab, this phase of their life has famously been reffered to as a ‘Facehugger’. The creepy little critters will then attach themselves to the face of a host, and impregnate them via their mouth. They will eventually detach, the host will wake up and, in time, will “give birth” to a bouncing baby beast, a xenomorph. The xenomorph will grow and shed it’s skin until it has reached full size, and the full capacity for destruction.
So that’s the xenomorph reproductive process, yuck, am I right? The fact that the way the alien’s reproduce is (when we break it down) weird, bestial, face-rape, is unsettling, and more than enough to disgust us on our own. As with the appearance of the aliens themselves, their reprduction takes something we are familiar with (sex) and (most of us) view in a positive way, and uses it to freak us out by turning it on it’s head and turning it into a terrifying, disturbing and weird process. But they don’t stop at the subversion of human sex, no sir, they take what should be the most secure, safe and comfortable place (physically and psychologically) and pervert it as much as they do sex. What I’m talking about is, of course, maternity.
The emphasis on the perversion of maternity is particularly evident in in both Aliens and Alien: Ressurection, but moreso that latter.
Whilst Aliens still presents a perversion of human maternity, it uses it mainly as a contrast to the relationship between Newt and Ripley. One of the main focusses of the film is the mother/daughter dynamic that their relationship has. They clearly care about each other, and Ripley fights relentlessly and self-sacrificially to save Newt. Having ‘lost’ her own daughter (or rather her daughter lost her) when she was a similar age to Newt, Ripley takes on full responsability for the orphan. It’s clear in every way that essentially Ripley has become Newt’s mother.
It’s my belief that the xeno queen was introduced in Aliens solely to contrast the relationship between the heroin and her ward. Sure, it introduces a new threat that is greater than the normal xenomorphs, so the fight at the end has more of an epic feeling, but size and danger alone aren’t good ways of raising the stakes in a story, there needs to be an emotional facet to the conflict too, which the queen provides brilliantly.
Alien: Ressurection is where things get real weird. Ripley isn’t really Ripley, she has an alien “child” of sorts, and her maternal instincts are now directed towards a person that isn’t really human. Instead of having two different mother/offspring-type relationships like we did in Aliens this time we actually have two conflicting offspring type characters. Call isn’t (by any stretch of the imagination) anything close to a biological daughter to Ripley, firstly, they aren’t related, secondly, (and slightly more importantly) Call is a robot. Despite not being a ‘real’ person, Call has very human qualities and characteristics, so much so that I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to say that she is, in her own way, human. Conversly, Ripley and her alien bub are indeed related in a biological sense, but in no way does this creature share the same human qualities as it’s mother, or even it’s rival artificial sibling.
This film doesn’t give us a stark contrast between wholesome mother/daughter relationship and a perverted and monstrous form of reproduction, it slams them together. No longer do we have a human duo to root for, knowing full well that they are the epitome of good in the movie. Nope, now we have a skewed relationship that despite having touching moments, is deeply unatural, and wholly unsettling.
There’s a lot more that can be analysed in the Alien films, and I’m sure at some juncture I’ll end up writing more about them, but for now that’s it, I hope you enjoyed reading.
In my opinion, Ridely Scott’s ‘Alien’ and it’s successors have had one of the greatest creations in the horror genre, H. R. Giger’s (and later Tom Woodruf jr’s) terrifying aliens.
The aliens are scary and unnerving, they are scary and unnerving because they are brilliant, they are brilliant because they take things that we’re familiar with (and in certain situations, are aroused by), and pervet them until we want to cry.
Here is a very bad photo I took of some of the concept art of ‘Alien’ drawn by H.R. Giger. If anything in those pictures looks like a robotic human reproduction organ, worry not, you don’t have a dirty mind, it’s meant to look like an androids junk.
If you’ve seen any of Giger’s art before, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what he was trying to evoke in these pictures. Much of Giger’s art (particularly Necronomicon) contained elements of warped sexual imagery (and by ‘warped’, I mean seriously warped. If you’ve ever wanted to see a picture of an androgynous critter giving fellatio to its own tail/genitals/whatever-the-hell-it-is, you should definitely check out his work), as ‘Alien’ was strongly influenced by Necronomicon it has a very similar aesthetic. This weird, psuedo-sexual imagery through all of the films is what makes them so brilliantly unnerving.
In the alien quadrilogy, the humans are very distinctly male or female, their ships and equipment are mechanical and modern, and we accept this as the norm. We see the clean-cut angles, smooth lines and flat surfaces as comfortable and safe in the context of the films, we’re even clearly shown early on (by way of sweaty, undressed emergence from sleep capsules) the gender of each of the human characters. These things are what our brains accept as the normal, safe things in the films, and as the aliens are everything that the humans aren’t, they are unsafe, weird and “alien” (see what I did there?).
The aliens (save the queen) have no clear form of sexual dimorphism, their architecture is strange and foreign and their reproduction is nothing short of disgusting. To add to the already foreign nature of the aliens, they actually have human-like characteristics. Initially one might think that a creature having more human-like elements, or at least something reminiscent of them, might make them seem less strange, but when put together in a certain way, they make the creature just that much stranger. The aliens are have what you might call a stereotypically feminine body, they have wider hips, small waists and ovoid ribcage, but this doesn’t make them seem feminine, the giant, phallic head makes sure of that. They are a disturbing mix of male and female that we’re not quite sure how to deal with; The same is true for their reproduction, a spider that looks like two hands with, well… with an alien vagina that shoots a penis-y thing down people throats to impregnate them (*ahem* there’s something I never thought I’d ever write), more mixed up sexual imagery, and you know, space creature face rape, that’s a thing there too I guess…
So basically, the ‘Alien’ franchise confuses us, we don’t know how to feel about the aliens (other than scared) because we don’t understand them, which makes for an overall unsettling experience. Next week, we’ll be taking a look at how Aliens and Alien: Resurrection take what should be the most normal, safe, comfortable and familiar thing in the universe and turn it into something terrifying.
An ink drawing of batman I just finished, I haven’t been able to draw properly for a while because of a wrist injury, so it’s great to be able to get going again (even if every small line looks like crap)
Hello reader, it’s been a while, but I’m back.
In the first part of this post, I looked at chapter 2 of The Hobbit, “Roast Mutton”, and how it showed Bilbo’s uneasy and uncomfortable battle between Baggins and Took progressing. Granted this struggle is evident throughout the story, but I feel that these two chapters are particularly important. So last time we looked at how the Tookish streak in Bilbo was starting to become a bit bolder, and his Baggins-ness was starting, at least in part, to subside. This time I’ll be looking at Bilbo’s journey in chapter 3 “A short rest” and in particular the impact that Rivendell has on both him, and the story.
The chapter begins with the troupe heading through the wilderness to Rivendell. We see impassable ravines, deep gullies and all sorts of things that a self-respecting hobbit would deem altogether unwholesome and highly uncomfortable. This feeling of discomfort is compounded by Bilbo’s simple question he puts towards his fellows “Is the the Mountain?” Bilbo asks, the Baggins in him hoping that the journey is nearing its end. This notion is quickly shot down by Balin, telling the hobbit that the mountain before them is the beginning of the misty mountains, essentially a mere stepping stone to their final destination. Bilbo’s hope for the journey’s end is crushed, and we as the reader feel can start to feel his sense of dread. The little fellow has had his high in dealing with the trolls in the most Tookish way imaginable, but now the reality of what he is doing really starts to set in.
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The Mind Cellar 