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.