The Sexuality and Inherent Horror of the Alien

Ridley Scott’s Alien is not a horror film of monsters, but a film of monstrosities, and that is precisely how it has managed to stay so terrifying even thirty years after its release.

Scott begins the film with long sequences of shots in which the scenery is defined by that which is absent from it -- humanity. We are given shots that are close to the bulkhead to suggest the cramped size of the halls and long shots of the control module so that we see how empty it is. Even the film’s title segment is an exercise in minimalism as the title slowly reveals itself from the emptiness of space. Scott next takes us on a tour of the cargo ship Nostromo as it functions wholly without a human crew. According to Mulhall, this “subtly inflects our sense of the relative dependence of human beings and their technological tools. . . . the ship’s need for them in these unusual circumstances only emphasizes their superfluity in normal circumstances” (15). We are not even ten minutes into the film, and Scott has already introduced us to a world where humanity is unnecessary. This sets up the rest of the film in which the alien itself will kill the crew, not out of malice, but simply because they are interfering with its survival and it is kill or be killed.

This sets up an almost archetypal understanding of horror as defined in by Stanley Cavell, that horror is “the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable” (Mulhall 17-18). It does not frighten us when Jones the cat jumps out from the locker when the music has led us to believe that it is the alien spawn; it frightens us when the science officer, the only one who truly knows about alien life, tells us that the alien cannot be killed, that it is a perfect organism.

When the humans begin actively hunting the alien, the cinematography changes as well. We go from fairly normal shots of locations to shots that have been specifically set up to look symmetrical. The most striking to me was when Ripley was standing in front of the airlock, waiting to close it behind the alien and jettison it. The camera starts out looking through the open door and pulls back very quickly to show Ripley standing by the door. We move from lightness to darkness, and we still remain symmetrical in frame.

Aliens, James Cameron’s sequel to Alien, is often the first film in the series in which people point out the vaginal/phallic imagery present in the aliens. The facehuggers look vaginal in shape, and the giant protusion on the back of the alien’s head is massively phallic. But this imagery is already present in Alien. Over and over again in the film, Scott shows the crew in long shots from down a hall, which could easily be interpreted as a birth canal metaphor. The alien kills the crew to survive, and to survive, he must exit the series of tunnels and hallways in the Nostromo to be free.

Here it is easy to see the phallus the alien has for a head (via: www.dreadcentral.com)

This sexual imagery is most present in Kane’s attack from the facehugger. After the attack on the planet, Kane “is impregnated with an alien foetus which his body then brings to term and labours to bring forth into the world; he undergoes a nightmare vision of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth” (Mulhall 20). Jerry Goldsmith’s score only adds to the feeling that what we are watching is a nightmare of the real. Often, the score consists of metallic screeches and wet, organic squishes. When Dallas is hunting the alien through the ventilation shafts, there are three heartbeats present: a human heartbeat, the electronic heartbeat of Lambert's tracking gun, and an iambic rhythm in the score (Winters 17). [Note: this was corrected from the initial post. I had misread the scene being analyzed as the scene in which Kane has a chestburster. -Nick]. The last clear shot of Dallas we see is him crouching in the air vent before the vent’s aperture closes on him, as if to cut him off from the rest of the crew. The sequence continues, and the only constant sound we are given is the beeping of the proximity sensor that Lambert holds to track the alien. Even when the shot is not on Lambert or the device, the beeping continues, steadily building our sense of dread, because the audience knows that once a character goes off into a secluded part of the ship on their own, they will be dead before the end of the sequence.

The entire film is constructed so that what we see and hear is not the most violent imagery, but the imagery that will make us the most tense. Dallas, Lambert, and Brett all die off-camera, and all we are left with are suggestions of their death. Lambert’s swinging, bloody foot, the totally bloodless flamethrower that Dallas left at the third junction, and the screams of Brett that suddenly cut off, for reasons that are perhaps best left to our imaginations.

The sexuality of the alien has penetrated popular culture (via: http://alienlovespredator.com)

Works Cited

Mulhall, Stephen. "Kane's Son, Cain's Daughter." On Film. London: Routledge, 2002. 12-32. Print

Scott, Ridley, dir. Alien. 1979. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Winters, Ben. "Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion." Music, Sound & the Moving Image 2.1 (Spring 2008): 3-25. EBSCOhost. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.

Dr. Strangelove

(Image courtesy: www.theoildrum.com)

When watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, it’s easy to assume that it is just a silly comedy about nuclear annihilation, and for many years, that’s how I interpreted it. This stance confused me, especially considering that of the rest of Kubrick’s body of work, I was only particularly familiar with A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Upon viewing Dr. Strangelovewith a critical eye to technique, however, I feel that it belongs in the upper echelon of Kubrick’s work.

The lighting of the film was the first thing that really struck me this time around. The very first time we see General Ripper (Jack D. Ripper, one of the many joke names in the film), he is in his office, enveloped by darkness, and he is on the phone with Mandrake, who is in what appears to be the brightest room in the whole base. Mandrake is called into Ripper’s office while the base is locked down, and he turns off the lights in that room to move to Ripper’s lair. While there, Mandrake is still lit by an overhead light while Ripper is not, until the gunfire outside destroys the only light left in the room.

The score particularly intrigued me as well. During most of the film, the score seems to move very organically from moment to moment, not particularly anything special, but not bad. Whenever “’Pappy’ Kong’s Flying Circus” (Stillman 491) is onscreen, the music is an orchestrated version of what I have only heard as a children’s song: “The Ants Go Marching” (Not to be confused with Dave Matthew’s song “Ants Marching”). The use of “The Ants Go Marching” implies the blind following of orders that is present in this plane as the crew marches on deliberately toward the beginning of a “Mutual Assured Destruction” (Stillman 492).

The other element that stuck out to me on this viewing was the cinematography of the film. Kubrick often employs long takes in which the camera does not move at all. It sticks with two or three characters in a medium shot and lets the humor of the dialogue carry the scene. For instance, when Gen. Ripper sits almost obscenely close to Mandrake and goes over the Communist plot to poison our essential “fluids” with fluoridation, the camera stays put for at least a minute.

(Image courtesy: nighthawknews.wordpress.com)

Alternately, whenever the men in the war room are talking, the camera often cuts to a high angle shot of the entire table, giving the sense of a massive, echo-y room full of men who are almost entirely disconnected with the matter at hand. I also didn’t notice that apparently the war room table is covered with the green felt to suggest a casino table, with the designer suggesting “‘It should be like a poker table: there’s the president, the generals and the Russian ambassador playing a game of poker for the fate of the world’” (Stillman 494).

The only part of the film that still wildly dissatisfies me is the very end of the film when Strangelove stands up, proclaiming “Mein Führer! I can walk!” (Kubrick). I just don’t really know what Kubrick is trying to say with Strangelove being able to stand up suddenly.

Works Cited

Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. 1964. Columbia Pictures, 2009.

Stillman, Grant, “Two of the MADdest Scientists.” Film History. 20 (2008): 487-500. Web. 24 Aug 2009.