Aliens 30th Anniversary: (re)viewing the film with "better eyes"

As the Blue-ray, special, anniversary edition of Aliens arrives in the UK, a challenging of some of the notions / accusations / misconceptions that still, persistently, follow this film is pertinent and timely. And what better way to do so by interrogating one of the seminal essays written about it, in Stephen Mullhull's book 'On Film' (Thinking in Action series. First published by Routledge, 2002. Transferred to Digital Printing, 2006)

To a cinephile Stephen Mulhall’s (a book, in which the Alien Quadrilogy is taken to be “an exemplary of cinema that finds itself in the condition of philosophy – of film as philosophy”) is a revelation. Especially if he, or most significantly, she was introduced to and became fascinated with this particular cinematic series by James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens (1986), and not by the original classic, Alien, directed in 1979 by Ridley Scott. Because among and in comparison with his pears in the creation of the Alien universe, Cameron is still considered less of an artist whose work deserves to be analysed (although he is the only "author" of the bunch, since he writes, directs and edits his films, himself) and more of a “designed for mass-consumption” product maker.

'On Film' is structured in the form of four chapters. Each of these investigates one of the motion pictures in the series, as well as takes into consideration other work by the director of that particular motion picture. The chapter dedicated to Cameron is, of course, the second one, entitled “Making Babies: James Cameron’s Aliens”. But before traveling to space and the monstrous future of the Aliens, the author stays on Earth pursuing the traces left in the present by another doomed future, in which the human race is on the verge of extinction ever since the evolution of a species of machines, ‘fathered’ by the self-aware, artificial intelligent computer, SkyNet. That is to say he is examining the case of the second (after the - granted disawoed - 1981’s b-movie Piranha Part Two: The Spawning) and not the first (as he identifies it) film in James Cameron career: The Terminator. This concerns the transformation of the under-achieving waitress Sarah Connor to a woman more than competent to terminate the cybernetic organism who has come from the future in order to kill her. It is a film by a director who feels comfortable not only with purposely wandering over the terrain of science-fiction, but also with the idea of a woman at the centre of a traditionally male oriented genre and a thematic structure undeniably similar to that of Alien, as it focuses on issues of survival, reproduction, sexual difference and female generativity. Thus, it demonstrates Cameron as the perfect candidate to direct the sequel to Alien. As if, Mulhall states, director and subject- matter “were each the other’s fate or destiny”, the same way Sarah is fated or destined to confront the Terminator - a terrifying being that must be death itself, embodied and made real, since it has no other interest, desire or aim than to deal death, can find its victims suddenly and without a warning and it cannot itself be killed. As such it categorically bears Heidegger’s characterization of death as “one’s own most, no relational, not-to-be-outstripped possibility”: it is driven to specifically annihilate this Sarah Connor".

What distinguishes Sarah from any other mortal meeting his or her death, though, is the fact that the Terminator has targeted her for a distinctive reason: she is the mother to be of the man who will bring about the extermination of the machines. In that way, Mulhall shrewdly states, her death is a kind of advance abortion, since her capacity to reproduce denotes the human capacity to reproduce and ensures the continuation of the existence of the human race into the future. On one hand this observation leads to an affirmative and empowering vision of femaleness: Sarah is meant to be the ideal of humanity as such and upon receiving this knowledge she is given a potent motive to cultivate herself and become a nurturing warrior. On the other hand, however, it is this particular aspect of her femaleness (the fertility of her body) that appears to sideline her as an individual, placing her in a solely instrumental role. She herself is not important. It is the fact that she will give birth to the man who will save the world that makes her significant. Furthermore, as a consequence of the film’s disruption of temporal order, her son, John, acquires the ability to become the author of his own birth, family, life and self: Kyle is the soldier he personally chose to send to his mother, not only as her protector and educator, but also as his father. Hence, Sarah turns out to be nothing more than a token in a complex relationship between men, in view of the fact that John is not alone in authoring his own life. By accepting his mission, Kyle has the opportunity to be the father of exactly the son he had wished for and at the same time (as did his son before him) take control over paternity, by insulating it from its inherent openness to unpredictability, due, in part, to the contribution of female fecundity. Of course, his version of the story is quite different. He claims he fell in love with Sarah the moment he encountered the expression of her face in a photograph of her, prompting Sarah to perceive his mission as “a quest across time motivated by love at first sight”. It is by no accident, however, that the photograph in question is revealed to have been taken at a moment of nostalgia for Sarah: when the memory of her lover is stirred on her face. In other words, Mulhall argues, Kyle sees in her eyes nothing but himself (already beloved by her) as well as his treasured son: “the consummation of the narcissistic fantasy of male sexual potency, of paternity and patriarchal family structure”. He goes on to ingeniously compare the later with the -situated at the heart of Christianity- Holy Family. In it we can find another single mail offspring whose birth was foretold, whose initials were J.C. and whose fate was to save humanity. And in it, as in Cameron’s version of it, we can locate the mother (Mary) occupying an apparently central but ultimately marginal position in the family’s structure (p.62).

At this point, Mulhall follows several different lines of thought, all ignited by the significant presence of the aforementioned photograph. Keeping in mind that the material basis of film is photographic, he identifies the photograph as a conduit through which Cameron may ponder over the nature of his medium. According to this reading, first, as John –a character we never see- is authoring his own birth, by giving the photograph to its most avid viewer, the same way Cameron –the director we can never see- authors his own birth as a director. It is an interesting idea, but quite an unfounded one because it takes for granted that is Cameron’s first and only film at this point. As I have already pointed out this is not the case. Second, the destruction of the photograph by the very technology, without which the photograph’s existence would have not been considered important that occurs in another possible future (dreamed by Sarah), is perceived to be Cameron’s expression of anxiety for what the future technological evolution holds for his medium and for himself as a director. And third, by taking into account Stanley Cavell’s contention that the “world of a photograph does not (and cannot) exist ”, there is an examination of the apparent conflict between the genre of science fiction and the granule of the cinematic medium– a paradox that Cameron is obviously aware of: in his film the future is disclosed through Kyle’s memories of it. Later on, Mulhall returns to some of these arguments in order to use them as compasses in his exploration of a “self-terminating sequel” as well as of the correlation between a male or female actor’s ability (or inability), to completely inhabit a character and his or her prospect to attain stardom.

When it comes to the distinctive approach Cameron holds for the sequel to Alien he was summoned to write and direct, Mulhall embarks on decoding it by recognising Aliens as a film composed with “displaced re-productions” of the basic elements originally found in the construction of its cinematic predecessor (p.67). Hence, Aliens could be comprehended as a series of multiple and multilayered repetitions, accomplished by Cameron’s choice to restage certain constituents of Alien’s basic plot-structure, to re-enact specific scenes or images and to infest his film with the figure 2. All are imaginatively utilized in order to invoke emotions essential to achieving the spectator’s involvement, such as the pleasure of recognition, the reassurance of familiarity and the satisfaction of the suspense provoked by an unpredictable outcome. He attains the latter, by displacing or transforming each of these recurrences in more (by magnifying them) or less (by subverting or inverting our expectations of them) obvious ways. Therefore Cameron acknowledges the fact that he is engaged in the creation of a sequel, but also makes sure to provide us with a further justification for its repetitive nature. As Mulhall points out, Aliens starts with Ripley having a nightmare of herself as a victim to the alien chest buster and ends with Ripley reassuring Newt that they can both have monster-free dreams again. All the reiterations taking place in between are, in consequence, crucial for her, because she has to relive a nightmare or re-experience a traumatic event in order to cure herself.

To do so, she must be allowed to locate and disable the source of her suffering. This is why Cameron not only returns to the geographical source of the alien species, but also uncovers its biological source, by exposing two previously unknown aspects of its reproductive mode. It could be said then, that the director is compelling not only Ripley but also the Alien series to confront what they have so far repressed, envisioning his film as the therapeutic session they both need. And it is in the understanding of what this therapy requires that Mulhall locates Cameron’s “deepest acknowledgment and most radical subversion” of the fundamental logic of Scott’s film (where Ripley’s resolute virginity is what renders her powerful enough to vanquish her alien opponent – a creature that is a monstrous vision of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth). For, in the end of Aliens, Ripley’s healing – her reward for facing her worst fears, is the acquisition of a family: Corporal Hicks (incarnated by Michael Bean – the actor who played Kyle Reese in The Terminator) becomes her husband and Newt (the last survivor of the colonists on the alien infested planet) their daughter. But since Ripley’s new family comes into being in a non-biological way, she succeeds in overcoming her nightmare, without having to admit her body’s fertility. In other words, like Scott’s Ripley, Cameron’s Ripley is fated to heroism only because she refuses to have sexual intercourse, become pregnant and give birth. She insists on repressing her reproductive drive, which she once again envisions as monstrous. It is true, that Cameron divulges that incarnated by the alien species monstrosity in unprecedentedly horrifying ways: he portrays the aliens as a monstrous whole by depicting it only in large numbers; he emphasizes the fact that, unlike any human equivalent, the community of the aliens (like that of the ants) does not allow any kind of individuality: each member functions only in a specific role in order to guarantee the consistency and the well being of the whole; he, most significantly, introduces us to the alien queen. In a pivotal scene towards the end of the film, having just saved Newt from the attack of a face hugger, Ripley stumbles upon the alien nursery and comes face to face with the awesome mother of her foe, as she ‘gives birth’ to a facehugger-egg, through the orifice of her repulsive egg sac. (Conspicuously enough however, the latter looks more like a giant, grotesque phallus, than anything resembling female genitalia. In fact most, if not all of the alien species' iconography is rather phallic. A possibly significant representation that Mulhall, like so many others before and after him, simply ignores)ςς. In Ripley’s eyes, Mulhall claims, the hideous alien queen is the embodiment of everything she and her family are not: “her vision of flesh and fertility, of the biological realm, of life as such”.

All of the above are argued without taking into account a scene included in the extended version of the film, in which, upon her return to Earth after 57 years of hypersleep, Ripley is seen to mourn the death of her only daughter, to whom she promised to return for her 11 birthday. In a footnote Mulhall refers to this scene but dismiss it as “it sacrifices Aliens consistency with Ripley’s nightmare vision of self and world, as declared in Alien; does not modify the counter-fleshly purity of Ripley’s new family; is a textbook example of a director’s ability to lose touch with his own best insights”. Nevertheless, it is a pity that he refuses to investigate its implications any further. Especially if we consider the fact that Cameron provides us with a different cut of one of his films only when he feels that it was tampered (and, thus, corrupted) by the studio upon its theatrical release. He is the one who restored more than 30 minutes of previously unused material to the Director’s Cut of The Abyss as well as around 15 minutes to the special edition of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but left untouched the original editing of both The Terminator and Titanic, including some deleted scenes of the latter only to the bonus material section of the Deluxe Collector’s DVD Edition. He is also the one who in the introduction of the special edition of Aliens, (found in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD Box Set), clearly states: “The conventional wisdom of the time was ‘don’t make the film to long’. But at 2 hours and 37 minutes this is the ride that we intended you to take”. What then, were we to discover if we more diligently explored the image of Ripley as a grieving mother – someone who had sexual intercourse, became pregnant and given birth even before the chronological starting point of Scott’s film? Could the resolution to put such an image at the beginning of the film (exactly after Ripley’s awakening from her chest-busting nightmare), be purely coincidental? What are we to derive from the fact that she was to see her biological daughter at her 11th birthday – approximately the same age Newt (whose nickname sounds like ‘new’) is? Would we be at fault if we came to the conclusion that Cameron radically strips Ripley from the virginity she was submitted to in Alien the same way (Mulhall suggests) the opening sequence of Alien3 strips her of her adopted family? Is it, therefore, at all plausible that the nightmare Ripley has to therapeutically relive is the horrible possibility of losing another child, by failing to prevent the death of either her new found daughter, or of her own, still fertile body? Furthermore, how significant is the fact that Ripley, (like Sarah Connor), becomes a nurturing warrior, but (unlike Sarah) she herself is important? Does this imply that, this time, it is the man who becomes a token in a complex relation between females (since, on one hand, Ripley expresses no concern for the fate of her dead daughter’s biological father and on the other, she seems to accept Hicks as a kind of an ideal bodyguard for her adoptive daughter, above anything else)? Could Cameron’s most inverted input to the Alien universe be his understanding of the alien species as monstrous predominantly because of the limited, central yet marginalized role masculinity holds within its community: in it, males are reduced to the roles of nurses, of dispensable soldiers or, even worse, of facehuggers fated to death as soon as they successfully impregnate the host? Why not, then, perceive Ripley as destined to heroically confront the alien queen only because she is also a mother, armed with the almighty drive to protect her (female) child at all costs?

Mulhall disputes our latter hypothesis. On one hand, he accepts the queen as Ripley’s mirror image, primarily because, at their core, they are both ‘nurturing warriors’. On the other hand however, he fathoms two distinctive dissimilarities between the two. First, the queen incarnates the drive to reproduce, which Ripley represses. Second, the queen is transformed into a warrior only when her nursery is attacked, unlike Ripley, who attacks the nursery out of vengeance, actually committing genocide! He founds this claim on the wordless bargain Ripley makes with the queen: “Let us go and I won’t torch your offspring”. A bargain, which according to him, is violated by Ripley herself: she does not hesitate to endanger hers or Newt’s life so that to annihilate the queen’s brood and with it the knowledge that such an incarnation of biological fertility might exist. However, a simple (re)examination of the scene at the nursery allows us to notice a certain detail that is either ignored or misread. After the bargain she stroke with the queen, Ripley places Newt behind her and they both move slowly backwards to safety. But as they reach the exit one of the eggs hatches. Ripley becomes aware of it and she realizes that in a matter of seconds the facehugger it contains will lash out against her, or worse, Newt. By her disappointed nod to the queen we understand that she feels betrayed. She has no alternative but to torch the nursery (admittedly but understandably, considering what she's been through, enraged). She is outnumbered. If she was to attack just that one egg, she would most probably provoke the fury of the queen anyway or risk the hatching of more eggs. So she triggers a total catastrophe in hope of buying herself enough time to escape, while the alien queen is lost in shock and confusion. Possibly, of course, the queen cannot control the behavior of the facehugger within the egg – she has no way to communicate to it her wishes (although Ripley’s expression suggests otherwise). It is also plausible that the parasite is driven by an undeniable natural instinct: it emerges as soon as it senses in its vicinity the present of a potential host. Even so, if she is to survive, Ripley has to exterminate it along with its siblings. Consequently, she does what she has to do in order to defend herself and protect her daughter. She is far from enacting genocide. In fact, she was rendered incapable of committing genocide, long before the events at the nursery took place: sometime after the destruction of the dropship, the surviving members of the mission, stranded in fortified areas of the colony habitat, are informed by Bishop that the high-tech apparatus which creates the breathable atmosphere is to inevitably explode within 4 hours due to overload.

In the light of this actuality, we can furthermore challenge what Mulhall ascertains when he approaches as a study to the Vietnam War. He argues that while Cameron intended to show “a high-tech army confident of victory being repeatedly defeated and humiliated by a more primitive civilization”, in effect he reinforces the vision of American political hubris and xenophobia, “by placing the Vietnamese in the position of the monstrous aliens and allowing the Marines to win the war by destroying the planet in a nuclear explosion”. But the fact is that even if Cameron puts the Vietnamese in the position of the alien species, he most certainly does not allow the Marines to win the war. Just before the conclusion of his film all the military personnel, apart from a badly wounded corporal Hicks, are dead – exterminated by their foes. They have, thus, been proven utterly inadequate to overpower an enemy they underestimated. Actually, they have lost the war. The nuclear explosion that brings about the annihilation of the aliens (and from which the last surviving humans barely escape) follows the Marines’ deaths and is caused by damaged machinery. In the end, it is attested that the only one who is able to defeat an alien in a duel (back on the mothership) is a woman, who never underestimated her enemies, A mother, who urged the Marines to do the same at the beginning of the mission and who, moreover, expressed some respect for them: “I don’t know which species is the worst. You don’t see them fucking each other over for a god-dammed percentage” she says to Burge after he tried to use her and Newt as vessels carrying live alien specimens for him to smuggle back to Earth.

Ultimately, the impression Mulhall has of Cameron’s Ripley as someone who deeply detests certain aspects of human life does not prevent him to diagnose visions of femininity as empowering and life giving force in Cameron’s following films, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It does not permit him, however, to identify Cameron’s significant imprint to the narrative and logic of both Fincher’s Alien3 and –mainly- Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection.